ime Susan and Etta had lost all sense of strangeness.
The spirit of adventure was rampant in them as in a dreaming
child. And the life they had been living--what they had seen and
heard and grown accustomed to--made it easy for them to strike
out at once and briskly in the new road, so different from the
dreary and cruel path along which they had been plodding. They
stood laughing and joking in the parlor while the boys
registered; then the four went up to two small but comfortable
and fascinatingly clean rooms with a large bathroom between.
"Fatty and I will go down to the bar while you two dress," said John.

"Not on your life!" exclaimed Fatty. "We'll have the bar brought
up to us."

But John, fortified by Susan's look of gratitude for his
tactfulness, whispered to his friend--what Susan could easily
guess. And Fatty said, "Oh, I never thought of it. Yes, we'll
give 'em a chance. Don't be long, girls."

"Thank you," said Susan to John.

"That's all right. Take your time."

Susan locked the hall door behind the two men. She rushed to the
bathroom, turned on the hot water. "Oh, Etta!" she cried, tears
in her eyes, a hysterical sob in her throat. "A bathtub again!"

Etta too was enthusiastic; but she had not that intense
hysterical joy which Susan felt--a joy that can be appreciated
only by a person who, clean by instinct and by lifelong habit,
has been shut out from thorough cleanliness for long months of
dirt and foul odors and cold. It was no easy matter to become
clean again after all those months. But there was plenty of soap
and brushes and towels, and at last the thing was accomplished.
Then they tore open the bundles and arrayed themselves in the
fresh new underclothes, in the simple attractive costumes of
jacket, blouse and skirt. Susan had returned to her class, and
had brought Etta with her.

"What shall we do with these?" asked Etta, pointing disdainfully
with the toe of her new boot to the scatter of the garments they
had cast off.

Susan looked down at it in horror. She could not believe that
_she_ had been wearing such stuff--that it was the clothing of
all her associates of the past six months--was the kind of
attire in which most of her fellow-beings went about the
beautiful earth, She shuddered. "Isn't life dreadful?" she
cried. And she kicked together the tattered, patched, stained
trash, kicked it on to a large piece of heavy wrapping paper she
had spread out upon the flo