p floor, was evicted
and Susan and Mrs. Tucker took her in. She protested that she
could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of
her life--that she preferred it to most beds. But Susan made
her up a kind of bed in the corner. They would not let her pay
anything. She had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung
trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that
preys upon working people. Her hair had dwindled to a meager
wisp. This she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with
an imitation tortoise-shell comb, huge, high, and broken, set
with large pieces of glass cut like diamonds. Her teeth were
all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth.

One day, when Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon were exchanging
eulogies upon the goodness of God to them, Susan shocked them
by harshly ordering them to be silent. "If God hears you," she
said, "He'll think you're mocking Him. Anyhow, I can't stand
any more of it. Hereafter do your talking of that kind when
I'm not here."

Another day Mrs. Reardon told about her sister. The sister had
worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a
rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture.
Like a series of others the sister caught the disease. But
instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the
face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she
had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it
with her fingers against her upper teeth. Used as Susan was to
hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident
preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked
shuddering about the streets--the streets with their incessant
march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and
worm-eaten. Until that day Susan had been about as unobservant
of the obvious things as is the rest of the race. On that day
she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with
mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease.
Hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and
hideously marked.

When she returned--and she did not stay out long--Mrs. Tucker
was alone. Said she:

"Mrs. Reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a
punishment for marrying a Protestant, she being a Catholic.
How ignorant some people is! Of course, the good Lord sent the
judgment on her for being a Catholic at all."

"Mrs. Tucker," said Susan, "did you ever hear of Nero?"