ents. They like
pretty girls for those places--if they're not giddy and don't
waste time flirting but use flirtation to sell goods. But what's
the sense in talking about it? You haven't got the clothes. A
saleslady's got to be counter-dressed. She can look as bad as
she pleases round the skirt and the feet. But from the waist up
she has to look natty, if she wants wages."

Susan had seen these girls; she understood now why they looked
as if they were the put together upper and lower halves of two
different persons. She recalled that, even though they went into
other business, they still retained the habit, wore toilets that
were counterbuilt. She revolved the problem of getting one of
these toilets and of securing a store job. But she soon saw it
was hopeless, for the time. Every cent the three had was needed
to keep from starving and freezing. Also--though she did not
realize it--her young enthusiasm was steadily being sapped by
the life she was leading. It may have been this rather than
natural gentleness--or perhaps it was as much the one as the
other--that kept Susan from taking Matson's advice and hardening
herself into a forelady. The ruddy glow under her skin had given
place to, the roundness of her form had gone, and its pallor;
beauty remained only because she had a figure which not even
emaciation could have deprived of lines of alluring grace. But
she was no longer quite so straight, and her hair, which it was
a sheer impossibility to care for, was losing its soft vitality.
She was still pretty, but not the beauty she had been when she
was ejected from the class in which she was bred. However, she
gave the change in herself little thought; it was the rapid
decline of Etta's prettiness and freshness that worried her most.

Not many weeks after the fire and the deeper plunge, she began
to be annoyed by Ashbel. In his clumsy, clownish way he was
making advances to her. Several times he tried to kiss her.
Once, when Etta was out, he opened the door of the room where
she was taking a bath in a washtub she had borrowed of the
janitress, leered in at her and very reluctantly obeyed her
sharp order to close the door. She had long known that he was in
reality very different from the silent restrained person fear
of his father made him seem to be. But she thought even the
reality was far above the rest of the young men growing up among
those degrading influences.

The intrusion into her room wa