entered the lungs.
Susan's nostrils were filled with the stenches of animal and
vegetable decay--stenches descending in heavy clouds from the
open windows of the flats and from the fire escapes crowded
with all manner of rubbish; stenches from the rotting, brimful
garbage cans; stenches from the groceries and butcher shops
and bakeries where the poorest qualities of food were exposed
to the contamination of swarms of disgusting fat flies, of
mangy, vermin-harassed children and cats and dogs; stenches
from the never washed human bodies, clad in filthy garments
and drawn out of shape by disease and toil. Sore eyes,
scrofula, withered arm or leg, sagged shoulder, hip out of
joint--There, crawling along the sidewalk, was the boy whose
legs had been cut off by the street car; and the stumps were
horribly ulcered. And there at the basement window drooled
and cackled the fat idiot girl whose mother sacrificed
everything always to dress her freshly in pink. What a
world!--where a few people such a very few!--lived in health
and comfort and cleanliness--and the millions lived in disease
and squalor, ignorant, untouched of civilization save to wear
its cast-off clothes and to eat its castaway food and to live
in its dark noisome cellars!--And to toil unceasingly to make
for others the good things of which they had none themselves!
It made her heartsick--the sadder because nothing could be
done about it. Stay and help? As well stay to put out a
conflagration barehanded and alone.

As the carriage reached wider Second Avenue, the horses broke
into a trot. Susan drew a long breath of the purer air--then
shuddered as she saw the corner where the dive into which the
cadet had lured her flaunted its telltale awnings. Lower
still her spirits sank when she was passing, a few blocks
further on, the music hall. There, too, she had had a chance,
had let hope blaze high. And she was going forward--into--the
region where she had been a slave to Freddie Palmer--no, to
the system of which he was a slave no less than she----

"I _must_ be strong! I _must!_" Susan said to herself, and
there was desperation in the gleam of her eyes, in the set of
her chin. "This time I will fight! And I feel at last that
I can."

But her spirits soared no more that day.

CHAPTER XIV

SPERRY had chosen for "Mr. and Mrs. Spenser" the second floor
rear of a house on the south side of West Forty-fifth Street
a few doors off Sixth Avenue