et at half past two that
afternoon to call upon Robert Brent was not the Susan Lenox
who returned to Delancey Street at half-past five. A man is
wandering, lost in a cave, is groping this way and that in
absolute darkness, with flagging hope and fainting
strength--has reached the point where he wonders at his own
folly in keeping on moving--is persuading himself that the
sensible thing would be to lie down and give up. He sees a
gleam of light. Is it a reality? Is it an illusion--one more
of the illusions that have lured him on and on? He does not
know; but instantly a fire sweeps through him, warming his
dying strength into vigor.

So it was with Susan.

The pariah class--the real pariah class--does not consist of
merely the women formally put beyond the pale for violations
of conventional morality and the men with the brand of thief
or gambler upon them. Our social, our industrial system has
made it far vaster. It includes almost the whole
population--all those who sell body or brain or soul in an
uncertain market for uncertain hire, to gain the day's food
and clothing, the night's shelter. This vast mass floats
hither and yon on the tides and currents of destiny. Now it
halts, resting sluggishly in a dead calm; again it moves,
sometimes slowly, sometimes under the lash of tempest. But it
is ever the same vast inertia, with no particle of it
possessing an aim beyond keeping afloat and alive. Susan had
been an atom, a spray of weed, in this Sargasso Sea.

If you observe a huge, unwieldy crowd so closely packed that
nothing can be done with it and it can do nothing with itself,
you will note three different types. There are the entirely
inert--and they make up most of the crowd. They do not
resist; they helplessly move this way and that as the chance
waves of motion prompt. Of this type is the overwhelming
majority of the human race. Here and there in the mass you
will see examples of a second type. These are individuals who
are restive and resentful under the sense of helplessness and
impotence. They struggle now gently, now furiously. They
thrust backward or forward or to one side. They thresh about.
But nothing comes of their efforts beyond a brief agitation,
soon dying away in ripples. The inertia of the mass and their
own lack of purpose conquer them. Occasionally one of these
grows so angry and so violent that the surrounding inertia
quickens into purpose--the purpose of making an end