.

"Don't think I'm a poor contemptible fool of a whiner. . . .
Yes, I _am_ a whiner! Susie, I ought to have been the woman
and you the man. Weak--weak--weak!"

She turned the gas low, bent over him, kissed his brow,
caressed him. "Let's do the best we can," she murmured.

He put his arm round her. "I wonder if there _is_ any hope," he
said. "No--there couldn't be."

"Let's not hope," pleaded she. "Let's just do the best we can."

"What--for instance?"

"You know the theater people. You might write a little play--a
sketch--and you and I could act it in one of the ten-cent houses."

"That's not a bad idea!" exclaimed he. "A little comedy--about
fifteen or twenty minutes." And he cast about for a plot,
found the beginnings of one the ancient but ever acceptable
commonplace of a jealous quarrel between two lovers--"I'll lay
the scene in Fifth Avenue--there's nothing low life likes so
much as high life." He sketched, she suggested. They planned
until broad day, then fell asleep, she half sitting up, his
head pillowed upon her lap.

She was awakened by a sense of a parching and suffocating heat.
She started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. But
a glance at him revealed the real cause. His face was fiery
red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered,
whispered, that indicated the delirium of a high fever. She
had first seen it when she and the night porter broke into
Burlingham's room in the Walnut Street House, in Cincinnati.
She had seen it many a time since; for, while she herself had
never been ill, she had been surrounded by illness all the
time, and the commonest form of it was one of these fevers,
outraged nature's frenzied rise against the ever denser swarms
of enemies from without which the slums sent to attack her.
Susan ran across the hall and roused Clara, who would watch
while she went for a doctor. "You'd better get Einstein in
Grand Street," Clara advised.

"Why not Sacci?" asked Susan.

"Our doctor doesn't know anything but the one thing--and
he doesn't like to take other kinds of cases. No, get
Einstein. . . . You know, he's like all of them--he won't
come unless you pay in advance."

"How much?" asked Susan.

"Three dollars. I'll lend you if----"

"No--I've got it." She had eleven dollars and sixty cents in
the world.

Einstein pronounced it a case of typhoid. "You must get him to
the hospital at once."

Susan and Clara looked at each other in