his fiend?

CHAPTER II

ELLEN, the maid, slept across the hall from Susan, in a closet
so dirty that no one could have risked in it any article of
clothing with the least pretension to cleanness. It was no
better, no worse than the lodgings of more than two hundred
thousand New Yorkers. Its one narrow opening, beside the door,
gave upon a shaft whose odors were so foul that she kept the
window closed, preferring heat like the inside of a steaming
pan to the only available "outside air." This in a civilized
city where hundreds of dogs with jeweled collars slept in
luxurious rooms on downiest beds and had servants to wait upon
them! The morning after Susan's coming, Ellen woke her, as
they had arranged, at a quarter before five. The night before,
Susan had brought up from the basement a large bucket of water;
for she had made up her mind, to take a bath every day, at
least until the cold weather set in and rendered such a luxury
impossible. With this water and what she had in her little
pitcher, Susan contrived to freshen herself up. She had bought
a gas stove and some indispensable utensils for three dollars
and seventeen cents in a Fourteenth Street store, a pound of
cocoa for seventy cents and ten cents' worth of rolls--three
rolls, well baked, of first quality flour and with about as
good butter and other things put into the dough as one can
expect in bread not made at home. These purchases had reduced
her cash to forty-three cents--and she ought to buy without
delay a clock with an alarm attachment. And pay
day--Saturday--was two days away.

She made a cup of cocoa, drank it slowly, eating one of the
rolls--all in the same methodical way like a machine that
continues to revolve after the power has been shut off. It was
then, even more than during her first evening alone, even more
than when she from time to time startled out of troubled
sleep--it was then, as she forced down her lonely breakfast,
that she most missed Rod. When she had finished, she completed
her toilet. The final glance at herself in the little mirror
was depressing. She looked fresh for her new surroundings and
for her new class. But in comparison with what she usually
looked, already there was a distinct, an ominous falling off.
"I'm glad Rod never saw me looking like this," she said aloud
drearily. Taking a roll for lunch, she issued forth at
half-past six. The hour and three-quarters she had allowed for
dressing an