ioning and cross-questioning, did she discover that Clara
had moved to Allen Street, to the tenement in which Susan
herself had for a few weeks lived--those vague, besotted weeks
of despair.

When we go out into the streets with bereavement in mind, we
see nothing but people dressed in mourning. And a similar
thing occurs, whatever the emotion that oppresses us. It
would not have been strange if Susan, on the way to Allen
Street afoot, had seen only women of the streets, for they
swarm in every great thoroughfare of our industrial cities.
They used to come out only at night. But with the passing of
the feeling against them that existed when they were a rare,
unfamiliar, mysteriously terrible minor feature of life, they
issue forth boldly by day, like all the other classes, making
a living as best they can. But on that day Susan felt as if
she were seeing only the broken down and cast-out creatures of
the class--the old women, old in body rather than in years,
picking in the gutters, fumbling in the garbage barrels,
poking and peering everywhere for odds and ends that might
pile up into the price of a glass of the poison sold in the
barrel houses. The old women--the hideous, lonely old
women--and the diseased, crippled children, worse off than the
cats and the dogs, for cat and dog were not compelled to wear
filth-soaked rags. Prosperous, civilized New York!

A group of these children were playing some rough game, in
imitation of their elders, that was causing several to howl
with pain. She heard a woman, being shown about by a
settlement worker or some such person, say:

"Really, not at all badly dressed--for street games. I must
confess I don't see signs of the misery they talk so much about."

A wave of fury passed through Susan. She felt like striking
the woman full in her vain, supercilious, patronizing
face--striking her and saying: "You smug liar! What if you
had to wear such clothes on that fat, overfed body of yours!
You'd realize then how filthy they are!"

She gazed in horror at the Allen Street house. Was it
possible that _she_ had lived there? In the filthy doorway sat
a child eating a dill pickle--a scrawny, ragged little girl
with much of her hair eaten out by the mange. She recalled
this little girl as the formerly pretty and lively youngster,
the daughter of the janitress. She went past the child
without disturbing her, knocked at the janitress' door. It
presently opened, disclo