"Oh, my, no," replied Lany with a laugh. "I read for the same
reason that all the rest do. It's a kind of dope. You read
and then you dream about the places--how grand they are and how
well off you'll be. But nobody'd be fool enough to answer one
of 'em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and
didn't care how rotten it was. No, it's just dope--like buyin'
policy numbers or lottery tickets. You know you won't git a
prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it."

As Susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with
workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment. Some
were doing a little better than she; others--the most--were
worse off chiefly because her education, her developed
intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows--such as
illness from rotten food--against which their ignorance made
them defenseless. Whenever she heard a story of someone's
getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories
she used to get out of the Sunday school library and dream
over! These almost actualities of getting on had nothing in
them about honesty and virtue. According to them it was always
some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness
or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in
session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how
to get on. If the success under discussion was a woman's, it
was always how her boss or employer had "got stuck on her" and
had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could
wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch. Now
and then it was a wonderful dazzling success--some girl had got
her rich employer so "dead crazy" about her that he had taken
her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with
a servant and a "swell trap"; there was even talk of marriage.

Was it true? Were the Sunday school books through and through
lies--ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies--wicked because
they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from
the housetops? Susan was not sure. Perhaps envy twisted
somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the
workers to each other. But certain it was that, wherever she
had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by
hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats. Certain it was also
that the general belief among the workers was that success
could be got in those ways only--and this belief made the
fal