where they can clean up a little, they 'most starve. Oh, that
life's hell."

Susan had turned away from her image, was looking at Rosa.

"As for the fast houses----" Rosa shuddered--"I was in one for
a week. I ran away--it was the only way I could escape. I'd
never tell any human being what I went through in that house. . . .
Never!" She watched Susan's fine sympathetic face, and
in a burst of confidence said: "One night the landlady sent me
up with seventeen men. And she kept the seventeen dollars I
made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken
longshoreman gave me as a present. She said I owed it for
board and clothes. In those houses, high and low, the girls
always owes the madam. They haven't a stitch of their own to
their backs."

The two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the
other into the wind-swept canyon of Broadway--the majestic
vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so
abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy
extravagance. Finally Susan said:

"Do you ever think of killing yourself?"

"I thought I would," replied the other girl. "But I guess I
wouldn't have. Everybody knows there's no hope, yet they keep
on hopin'. And I've got pretty good health yet, and once in a
while I have some fun. You ought to go to dances--and drink.
You wouldn't be blue _all_ the time, then."

"If it wasn't for the sun," said Susan.

"The sun?" inquired Rosa.

"Where I came from," explained Susan, "it rained a great deal,
and the sky was covered so much of the time. But here in New
York there is so much sun. I love the sun. I get
desperate--then out comes the sun, and I say to myself, 'Well,
I guess I can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'"

"I hadn't thought of it," said Rosa, "but the sun is a help."

That indefatigable New York sun! It was like Susan's own
courage. It fought the clouds whenever clouds dared to appear
and contest its right to shine upon the City of the Sun, and
hardly a day was so stormy that for a moment at least the sun
did not burst through for a look at its beloved.

For weeks Susan had eaten almost nothing. During her previous
sojourn in the slums--the slums of Cincinnati, though they were
not classed as slums--the food had seemed revolting. But she
was less discriminating then. The only food she could afford
now--the food that is the best obtainable for a majority of the
inhabitants of any city--was simply