be
over nice and critical, would hesitate to take the only upward
path fate saw fit to offer, then--let her seek the bottom!
Susan peered down, and shuddered.

She went into the saloon at the corner, into the little back
room. She poured down drink after drink of the frightful
poison sold as whiskey with the permission of a government
owned by every interest that can make big money out of a race
of free men and so can afford to pay big bribes. It is
characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement
quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of
quick insanity, of immediate degeneration--a desire to commit
crime, to do degraded acts. Within an hour of Susan's being
thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her. She
had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young
and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table.
The three, fired and maddened by the poison, were amusing
themselves and two young men as recklessly intoxicated as they.
Susan, in an attitude she had seen often enough but had never
dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coarse song, was
standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken
rhythm as she led the chorus.

When the barkeeper announced closing time, one of the young men
said to her:

"Which way?"

"To hell," laughed she. "I've been thrown out everywhere else.
Want to go along?"

"I'll never desert a perfect lady," replied he.

CHAPTER X

SHE was like one who has fallen bleeding and broken into a
cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls
toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly
sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward
and down into a deeper chasm.

Occasionally sheer exhaustion of nerves made it impossible for
her to drink herself again into apathy before the effects of
the last doses of the poison had worn off. In these intervals
of partial awakening--she never permitted them to lengthen out,
as such sensation as she had was of one
falling--falling--through empty space--with whirling brain and
strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or
hallucinations before the eyes--falling
down--down--whither?--to how great a depth?--or was there no
bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black
of death's bottomless oblivion?

Drink--always drink. Yet in every other way she took care of
her health--a strange mingling of