ess of her small, pallid face with
its earnest violet-gray eyes and its frame of abundant dark
hair, simply and gracefully arranged. She was of the advance
guard of a type which the swift downfall of the middle class,
the increasing intelligence and restlessness and love of
luxury among women, and the decay of formal religion with its
exactions of chastity as woman's one diamond-fine jewel, are
now making familiar in every city. The demand for the
luxurious comfort which the educated regard as merely decent
existence is far outstripping the demand for, and the
education of, women in lucrative occupations other than
prostitution.

Luckily Susan had not been arrested under her own name; there
existed no court record which could be brought forward as
proof by some nosing newspaper.

Susan herself marveled that there was not more trace of her
underworld experience in her face and in her mind. She could
not account for it. Yet the matter was simple enough to one
viewing it from the outside. It is what we think, what we
feel about ourselves, that makes up our expression of body and
soul. And never in her lowest hour had her soul struck its
flag and surrendered to the idea that she was a fallen
creature. She had a temperament that estimated her acts not
as right and wrong but as necessity. Men, all the rest of the
world, might regard her as nothing but sex symbol; she
regarded herself as an intelligence. And the filth slipped
from her and could not soak in to change the texture of her
being. She had no more the feeling or air of the _cocotte_
than has the married woman who lives with her husband for a
living. Her expression, her way of looking at her fellow
beings and of meeting their looks, was that of the woman of
the world who is for whatever reason above that slavery to
opinion, that fear of being thought bold or forward which
causes women of the usual run to be sensitive about staring or
being stared at. Sometimes--in _cocottes_, in stage women, in
fashionable women--this expression is self-conscious, or
supercilious. It was not so with Susan, for she had little
self-consciousness and no snobbishness at all. It merely gave
the charm of worldly experience and expertness to a beauty
which, without it, might have been too melancholy.

Susan, become by sheer compulsion philosopher about the
vagaries of fat, did not fret over possible future dangers.
She dismissed them and put all her intelligence and ene