sistent with
buying the best quality--for she had learned by bitter
experience the ravages poor quality food makes in health and
looks, had learned why girls of the working class go to pieces
swiftly after eighteen. She must fight to keep health--sick
she did not dare be. She must fight to keep looks--her figure
was her income.

Eighty cents a day. The outlook was not so gloomy. A cup of
cocoa in the morning--made at home of the best cocoa, the kind
that did not overheat the blood and disorder the skin--it
would cost her less than ten cents. She would carry lunch with
her to the store. In the evening she would cook a chop or
something of that kind on the gas stove she would buy. Some
days she would be able to save twenty or even twenty-five
cents toward clothing and the like. Whatever else happened,
she was resolved never again to sink to dirt and rags. Never
again!--never! She had passed through that experience once
without loss of self-respect only because it was by way of
education. To go through it again would be yielding ground in
the fight--the fight for a destiny worth while which some latent
but mighty instinct within her never permitted her to forget.

She sat at the table, with the shutters closed against the
fiery light of the summer afternoon sun. That hideous
unacceptable heat! With eyelids drooped--deep and dark were the
circles round them--she listened to the roar of the city, a
savage sound like the clamor of a multitude of famished wild
beasts. A city like the City of Destruction in "Pilgrim's
Progress"--a city where of all the millions, but a few
thousands were moving toward or keeping in the sunlight of
civilization. The rest, the swarms of the cheap boarding
houses, cheap lodging houses, tenements--these myriads were
squirming in darkness and squalor, ignorant and never to be
less ignorant, ill fed and never to be better fed, clothed in
pitiful absurd rags or shoddy vulgar attempts at finery, and
never to be better clothed. She would not be of those! She
would struggle on, would sink only to mount. She would work;
she would try to do as nearly right as she could. And in the
end she must triumph. She would get at least a good part of
what her soul craved, of what her mind craved, of what her
heart craved.

The heat of this tenement room! The heat to which poverty was
exposed naked and bound! Would not anyone be justified in
doing anything--yes, _anything_--to escape from t