for the young have not yet learned
to value life, have not yet fallen under life's sinister spell
that makes human beings cling more firmly and more cravenly to
it as they grow older. The young must have something--some hope,
however fanatic and false--to live for. They will not tarry just
to live. And in that hour Susan had lost hope.

She took off her street dress and opened her trunk to get a
wrapper and bedroom slippers. As she lifted the lid, she saw an
envelope addressed "Lorna"; she remembered that Redmond had
locked and strapped the trunk. She tore the end from the
envelope, looked in. Some folded bills; nothing more. She sat on
the floor and counted two twenties, five tens, two fives--a
hundred dollars! She looked dazedly at the money--gave a cry of
delight--sprang to her feet, with a change like the startling
shift from night to day in the tropics.

"I can pay!" she cried. "I can pay!"

Bubbling over with smiles and with little laughs, gay as even
champagne and the release from the vile prison of the slums had
made her, she with eager hands took from the trunk her best
clothes--the jacket and skirt of dark gray check she had bought
for thirty dollars at Shillito's and had had altered to her
figure and her taste; the blouse of good quality linen with
rather a fancy collar; the gray leather belt with a big
oxidized silver buckle; her only pair of silk stockings; the
pair of high-heeled patent leather shoes--the large black hat
with a gray feather curling attractively round and over its
brim. The hat had cost only fourteen dollars because she had put
it together herself; if she had bought it made, she would have
paid not less than thirty dollars.

All these things she carefully unpacked and carefully laid out.
Then she thoroughly brushed her hair and did it up in a graceful
pompadour that would go well with the hat. She washed away the
traces of her outburst of grief, went over her finger nails, now
almost recovered from the disasters incident to the life of
manual labor. She went on to complete her toilet, all with the
same attention to detail--a sure indication, in one so young, of
a desire to please some specific person. When she had the hat
set at the satisfactory angle and the veil wound upon it and
draped over her fresh young face coquettishly, she took from her
slender store of gloves a fresh gray pair and, as she put them
on, stood before the glass examining herself.

There was now