earse--a white hearse, with
polished mountings, the horses caparisoned in white netting,
and tossing white plumes. A baby's funeral--this mockery of
a ride in state after a brief life of squalor. It was summer,
and the babies were dying like lambs in the shambles. In
winter the grown people were slaughtered; in summer the
children. Across the street, a few doors up, the city dead
wagon was taking away another body--in a plain pine box--to
the Potter's Field where find their way for the final rest one
in every ten of the people of the rich and splendid city of
New York.

Susan hurried into her cab. "Drive fast," she said.

When she came back to sense of her surroundings she was flying
up wide and airy Fifth Avenue with gorgeous sunshine bathing
its palaces, with wealth and fashion and ease all about her.
Her dear City of the Sun! But it hurt her now, was hateful to
look upon. She closed her eyes; her life in the slums, her
life when she was sharing the lot that is really the lot of
the human race as a race, passed before her--its sights and
sounds and odors, its hideous heat, its still more hideous
cold, its contacts and associations, its dirt and disease and
degradation. And through the roar of the city there came to
her a sound, faint yet intense--like the still, small voice
the prophet heard--but not the voice of God, rather the voice
of the multitude of aching hearts, aching in hopeless
poverty--hearts of men, of women, of children----

The children! The multitudes of children with hearts that no
sooner begin to beat than they begin to ache. She opened her
eyes to shut out these sights and that sound of heartache.

She gazed round, drew a long breath of relief. She had almost
been afraid to look round lest she should find that her escape
had been only a dream. And now the road she had chosen--or,
rather, the only road she could take--the road with Freddie
Palmer--seemed attractive, even dazzling. What she could not
like, she would ignore--and how easily she, after her
experience, could do that! What she could not ignore she
would tolerate would compel herself to like.

Poor Clara!--Happy Clara!--better off in the dregs of the
river than she had ever been in the dregs of New York. She
shuddered. Then, as so often, the sense of the grotesque
thrust in, as out of place as jester in cap and bells at a
bier--and she smiled sardonically. "Why," thought she,
"in being squeamish about Freddie I'm s