Redmond, well known as a lawyer-politician in Chicago--had
nothing like so much as Gulick, still he had enough to make a
passable pretense at keeping up his end. For Etta and Susan the
city had meant shabby to filthy tenements, toil and weariness
and sorrow. There was opened to their ravished young eyes "the
city"--what reveals itself to the pleasure-seeker with pocket
well filled--what we usually think of when we pronounce its
name, forgetting what its reality is for all but a favored few
of those within its borders. It was a week of music and of
laughter--music especially--music whenever they ate or drank,
music to dance by, music in the beer gardens where they spent
the early evenings, music at the road houses where they arrived
in sleighs after the dances to have supper--unless you choose to
call it breakfast. You would have said that Susan had slipped
out of the tenement life as she had out of its garments, that she
had retained not a trace of it even in memory. But--in those days
began her habit of never passing a beggar without giving something.

Within three or four days this life brought a truly amazing
transformation in the two girls. You would not have recognized
in them the pale and wan and ragged outcasts of only the
Saturday night before. "Aren't you happy?" said Etta to Susan,
in one of the few moments they were alone. "But I don't need to
ask. I didn't know you could be so gay."

"I had forgotten how to laugh," replied Susan.

"I suppose I ought to be ashamed," pursued Etta.

"Why?" inquired Susan.

"Oh, you know why. You know how people'd talk if they knew."

"What people?" said Susan. "Anyone who's willing to give you anything?"

"No," admitted Etta. "But----" There she halted.

Susan went on: "I don't propose to be bothered by the other
kind. They wouldn't do anything for me if they could except
sneer and condemn."

"Still, you know it isn't right, what we're doing."

"I know it isn't cold--or hunger--or rags and dirt--and bugs,"
replied Susan.

Those few words were enough to conjure even to Etta's duller
fancy the whole picture to its last detail of loathsome squalor.
Into Etta's face came a dazed expression. "Was that really _us_, Lorna?"

"No," said Susan with a certain fierceness. "It was a dream. But
we must take care not to have that dream again."

"I'd forgotten how cold I was," said Etta; "hadn't you?"

"No," said Susan, "I hadn't forgotten anything."

"Ye