o get her to go up
to Gussie's for a smoke. She opened a door she had never
happened to enter before--a dingy door with the glass frosted.
Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of
the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the
sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in
such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen.
She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping
with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was
the piano, battered, about to fall to pieces, its ancient and
horrid voice cracked by the liquor which had been poured into
it by facetious drunkards. At the keyboard sat an old
hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye
instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made
her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was
evidently imagining. His filthy fingers were pounding out a
waltz. About the floor were tottering in the measure of the
waltz a score of dreadful old women. They were in calico.
They had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon
the crown of the head. From their bleached, seamed old faces
gleamed the longings or the torments of all the passions they
could no longer either inspire or satisfy. They were one time
prostitutes, one time young, perhaps pretty women, now
descending to death--still prostitutes in heart and mind but
compelled to live as scrub women, cleaners of all manner of
loathsome messes in dives after the drunkards had passed on.
They were now enjoying the reward of their toil, the pleasures
of which they dreamed and to which they looked forward as they
dragged their stiff old knees along the floors in the wake of
the brush and the cloth. They were drinking biting poisons
from tin cups--for those hands quivering with palsy could not
be trusted with glass-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or
twisted legs--venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange
cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of damned souls at
the licking of quenchless flames.

Susan stood rooted to the threshold of that frightful
scene--that vision of the future toward which she was hurrying.
A few years--a very few years--and, unless she should have
passed through the Morgue, here she would be, abandoning her
body to abominations beyond belief at the hands of degenerate
oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of
this dance hall. And sh