ation was hers!
How slender her chances of escape from another catastrophe.
She leaned against wall or table and was shaken by violent
fits of shuddering. She felt herself slipping--slipping. It
was all she could do to refrain from crying out. In those
moments, no trace of the self-possessed Susan the world always
saw. Her fancy went mad and ran wild. She quivered under the
actuality of coarse contacts--Mrs. Tucker in bed with her--the
men who had bought her body for an hour--the vermin of the
tenements--the brutal hands of policemen.

Then with an exclamation of impatience or of anger she would
shake herself together and go resolutely on--only again to
relapse. "Because I so suddenly cut off the liquor and the
opium," she said. It was the obvious and the complete
explanation. But her heart was like lead, and her sky like
ink. This note, the day after having tried her out as a
possibility for the stage and as a woman. She stared down at
the crumpled note in the wast-basket. That note--it was
herself. He had crumpled her up and thrown her into the
waste-basket, where she no doubt belonged.

It was nearly noon before she, dressed with unconscious care,
stood in the street doorway looking about uncertainly as if
she did not know which way to turn. She finally moved in the
direction of the theater where Rod's play was rehearsing. She
had gone to none of the rehearsals because Rod had requested
it. "I want you to see it as a total surprise the first
night," explained he. "That'll give you more pleasure, and
also it will make your criticism more valuable to us." And
she had acquiesced, not displeased to have all her time for
her own affairs. But now she, dazed, stunned almost,
convinced that it was all over for her with Brent,
instinctively turned to Rod to get human help--not to ask for
it, but in the hope that somehow he would divine and would say
or do something that would make the way ahead a little less
forbidding--something that would hearten her for the few first
steps, anyhow. She turned back several times--now, because
she feared Rod wouldn't like her coming; again because her
experience--enlightened good sense--told her that Rod
would--could--not help her, that her sole reliance was
herself. But in the end, driven by one of those spasms of
terror lest the underworld should be about to engulf her
again, she stood at the stage door.

As she was about to negotiate the surly looking man on gu