possible, any other or better life for the
masses. She simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as
best she could.

Throughout the masses of mankind life is sustained by
illusions--illusions of a better lot tomorrow, illusions of a
heaven beyond a grave, where the nightmare, life in the body,
will end and the reality, life in the spirit, will begin. She
could not join the throngs moving toward church and synagogue
to indulge in their dream that the present was a dream from
which death would be a joyful awakening. She alternately
pitied and envied them. She had her own dream that this dream,
the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and
freedom and light and beauty. She admitted to herself that the
dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs.
But she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were
of theirs. She dreamed it because she was a human being--and
to be human means to hope, and to hope means to dream of a
brighter future here or hereafter, or both here and hereafter.
The earth is peopled with dreamers; she was but one of them.
The last thought of despair as the black earth closes is a
hope, perhaps the most colossal of hope's delusions, that there
will be escape in the grave.

There is the time when we hope and know it and believe in it.
There is the time when we hope and know it but have ceased to
believe in it. There is the time when we hope, believing that
we have altogether ceased to hope. That time had come for
Susan. She seemed to think about the present. She moved about
like a sleepwalker.

What women did she know--what men? She only dimly remembered
from day to day--from hour to hour. Blurred faces passed
before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred
personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge
crowd in night streets. A vague sense of buffetings--of rude
contacts--of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of
disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten.

In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take
into account a more important factor--the merciful paralysis or
partial paralysis of any center of sensibility--that is
insistently assaulted.

She no longer had headaches or nausea after drinking deeply.
And where formerly it had taken many stiff doses of liquor to
get her into the state of recklessness or of indifference, she
was now able to put herself into the mood in which life was
endurable wi