il smell on me!"

Susan colored painfully--and Palmer, the sensitive, colored
also. But he had the tact that does not try to repair a
blunder by making a worse one; he pretended not to see Susan's
crimson flush.

_Her_ past would not be an easy matter--if it should ever rise
to face her publicly. Therefore it must not rise till Freddie
and she were within the walls of the world they purposed to
enter by stealth, and had got themselves well intrenched.
Then she would be Susan Lenox of Sutherland, Indiana, who had
come to New York to study for the stage and, after many trials
from all of which she had emerged with unspotted virtue,
whatever vicious calumny might in envy say, had captured the
heart and the name of the handsome, rich young contractor.
There would be nasty rumors, dreadful stories, perhaps. But
in these loose and cynical days, with the women more and more
audacious and independent, with the universal craving for
luxury beyond the reach of laboriously earned incomes, with
marriage decaying in city life among the better classes--in
these easy-going days, who was not suspected, hinted about,
attacked? And the very atrociousness of the stories would
prevent their being believed. One glance at Susan would be
enough to make doubters laugh at their doubts.

The familiar types of fast women of all degrees come from the
poorest kinds of farms and from the tenements. In America,
practically not until the panics and collapses of recent years
which have tumbled another and better section of the middle
class into the abyss of the underworld--not until then did
there appear in the city streets and houses of ill repute any
considerable number of girls from good early surroundings.
Before that time, the clamor for luxury--the luxury that
civilization makes as much a necessity as food--had been
satisfied more or less by the incomes of the middle class; and
any girl of that class, with physical charm and shrewdness
enough to gain a living as outcast woman, was either supported
at home or got a husband able to give her at least enough of
what her tastes craved to keep her in the ranks of the
reputable. Thus Susan's beauty of refinement, her speech and
manner of the lady, made absurd any suggestion that she could
ever have been a fallen woman. The crimson splash of her
rouged lips did not suggest the _cocotte_, but the lady with a
dash of gayety in her temperament. This, because of the
sweet, sensitive seriousn