escape, but suicide the close and
intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all
griefs--suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst
problem destiny can put to man.

She saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it.
"I'll wait till my money's gone," thought she. Then she
remembered Etta--how gentle and loving she was, how utterly she
gave herself--for Susan was still far from the profound
knowledge of character that enables us to disregard outward
signs in measuring actualities. "If I really weren't harder than
Etta," her thoughts ran on reproachfully, "I'd not wait until
the money went. I'd kill myself now, and have it over with." The
truth was that if the position of the two girls had been
reversed and Susan had loved Gulick as intensely as Etta
professed and believed she loved him, still Susan would have
given him up rather than have left Etta alone. And she would
have done it without any sense of sacrifice. And it must be
admitted that, whether or not there are those who deserve credit
for doing right, certainly those who do right simply because
they cannot do otherwise--the only trustworthy people--deserve
no credit for it.

She counted her money--twenty-three dollars in bills, and some
change. Redmond had given her fifty dollars each time they had
gone shopping, and had made her keep the balance--his indirect
way of adjusting the financial side. Twenty-three dollars meant
perhaps two weeks' living. Well, she would live those two weeks
decently and comfortably and then--bid life adieu unless
something turned up--for back to the streets she would not go.
With Etta gone, with not a friend anywhere on earth, life was
not worth the price she had paid for Etta and herself to the
drunken man. Her streak of good fortune in meeting Redmond had
given her no illusions; from Mabel Connemora, from what she
herself had heard and seen--and experienced--she knew the street
woman's life, and she could not live that life for herself
alone. She could talk about it to Redmond tranquilly. She could
think about it in the abstract, could see how other women did
it, and how those who had intelligence might well survive and
lift themselves up in it. But do it she could not. So she
resolved upon suicide, firmly believing in her own resolve. And
she was not one to deceive herself or to shrink from anything
whatsoever. Except the insane, only the young make these
resolves and act upon them;