; she was disgusted with
herself. But she drifted on.

Growing seedier looking every day, she waited, defying the
plain teachings of experience. She even thought seriously of
going to work. But the situation in that direction remained
unchanged. She was seeing things, the reasons for things, more
clearly now, as experience developed her mind. She felt that
to get on in respectability she ought to have been either more
or less educated. If she had been used from birth to
conditions but a step removed from savagery, she might have
been content with what offered, might even have felt that she
was rising. Or if she had been bred to a good trade, and
educated only to the point where her small earnings could have
satisfied her desires, then she might have got along in
respectability. But she had been bred a "lady"; a Chinese
woman whose feet have been bound from babyhood until her
fifteenth or sixteenth year--how long it would be, after her
feet were freed, before she could learn to walk at all!--and
would she ever be able to learn to walk well?

What is luxury for one is squalor for another; what is
elevation for one degrades another. In respectability she
could not earn what was barest necessity for her--what she was
now getting at Lange's--decent shelter, passable food. Ejected
from her own class that shelters its women and brings them up
in unfitness for the unsheltered life, she was dropping as all
such women must and do drop--was going down, down,
down--striking on this ledge and that, and rebounding to resume
her ever downward course.

She saw her own plight only too vividly. Those whose outward
and inward lives are wide apart get a strong sense of dual
personality. It was thus with Susan. There were times when
she could not believe in the reality of her external life.

She often glanced through the columns on columns, pages on
pages of "want ads" in the papers--not with the idea of
answering them, for she had served her apprenticeship at that,
but simply to force herself to realize vividly just how matters
stood with her. Those columns and pages of closely printed
offerings of work! Dreary tasks, all of them--tasks devoid of
interest, of personal sense of usefulness, tasks simply to keep
degrading soul in degenerating body, tasks performed in filthy
factories, in foul-smelling workrooms and shops, in unhealthful
surroundings. And this, throughout civilization, was the
"honest work" so praised-