ot it in for me. But I'll ruin him! I'll tear him up!"

Susan dressed with the utmost deliberation, the madam urging
her to make haste. After some argument, Susan yielded to the
madam's pleadings and contented herself with the twenty
dollars. The madam herself escorted Susan down to the outside
door and slathered her with sweetness and politeness. The rain
had stopped again. Susan went up Second Avenue slowly. Two
blocks from the dive from which she had escaped, she sank down
on a stoop and fainted.

CHAPTER IX

THE dash of cold rain drops upon her face and the chill of
moisture soaking through her clothing revived her. Throughout
the whole range of life, whenever we resist we suffer. As
Susan dragged her aching, cold wet body up from that stoop, it
seemed to her that each time she resisted the penalty grew
heavier. Could she have been more wretched had she remained in
that dive? From her first rebellion that drove her out of her
uncle's house had she ever bettered herself by resisting? She
had gone from bad to worse, from worse to worst.

Worst? "This _must_ be the worst!" she thought. "Surely there
can be no lower depth than where I am now." And then she
shuddered and her soul reeled. Had she not thought this at
each shelf of the precipice down which she had been falling?
"Has it a bottom? Is there no bottom?"

Wet through, tired through, she put up her umbrella and forced
herself feebly along. "Where am I going? Why do I not kill
myself? What is it that drives me on and on?"

There came no direct answer to that last question. But up from
those deep vast reservoirs of vitality that seemed sufficient
whatever the drain upon them--up from those reservoirs welled
strength and that unfaltering will to live which breathes upon
the corpse of hope and quickens it. And she had a sense of an
invisible being, a power that had her in charge, a destiny,
walking beside her, holding up her drooping strength, compelling
her toward some goal hidden in the fog and the storm.

At Eighth Street she turned west; at Third Avenue she paused,
waiting for chance to direct her. Was it not like the
maliciousness of fate that in the city whose rarely interrupted
reign of joyous sunshine made her call it the city of the Sun
her critical turn of chance should have fallen in foul weather?
Evidently fate was resolved on a thorough test of her
endurance. In the open square, near the Peter Cooper statue,
st