gainst dirt, against the vermin that could crawl
everywhere--and did. She envied the ignorant and the insensible
their lack of consciousness of their own plight--like the
disemboweled horse that eats tranquilly on. At first she had
thought her unhappiness came from her having been used to better
things, that if she had been born to this life she would have
been content, gay at times. Soon she learned that laughter does
not always mean mirth; that the ignorant do not lack the power
to suffer simply because they lack the power to appreciate; that
the diseases, the bent bodies, the harrowed faces, the
drunkenness, quarreling, fighting, were safer guides to the real
conditions of these people than their occasional guffaws and
fits of horseplay.

A woman from the hilltop came in a carriage to see about a
servant. On her way through the hall she cried out: "Gracious!
Why don't these lazy creatures clean up, when soap costs so
little and water nothing at all!" Susan heard, was moved to face
her fiercely, but restrained herself. Of what use? How could the
woman understand, if she heard, "But, you fool, where are we to
get the time to clean up?--and where the courage?--and would soap
enough to clean up and keep clean cost so little, when every
penny means a drop of blood?"

"If they only couldn't drink so much!" said Susan to Tom.

"What, then?" retorted he. "Why, pretty soon wages'd be cut
faster than they was when street carfares went down from ten
cents to five. Whenever the workin' people arrange to live
cheaper and to try to save something, down goes wages. No, they
might as well drink. It helps 'em bear it and winds 'em up
sooner. I tell you, it ain't the workin' people's fault--it's
the bosses, now. It's the system--the system. A new form of
slavery, this here wage system--and it's got to go--like the
slaveholder that looked so copper-riveted and Bible-backed in
its day."

That idea of "the system" was beyond Susan. But not what her
eyes saw, and her ears heard, and her nose smelled, and her
sense of touch shrank from. No ambition and no reason for
ambition. No real knowledge, and no chance to get any--neither
the leisure nor the money nor the teachers. No hope, and no
reason for hope. No God--and no reason for a God.

Ideas beyond her years, beyond her comprehension, were stirring
in her brain, were making her grave and thoughtful. She was
accumulating a store of knowledge about life; she w