Rosa laughed."You're right.It's something else besides luck.The trouble is a girl loses her head--falls in love--supports a man--takes to drink--don't look out for her health--wastes her money.Still--where's the girl with head enough to get on where there's so many temptations?""But there's no chance at all, keeping straight, you say.""The other thing's worse.The street girls--of our class, Imean--don't average as much as we do.And it's an awful business in winter.And they spend so much time in station houses and over on the Island.And, gosh! how the men do treat them! You haven't any idea.You wouldn't believe the horrible things the girls have to do to earn their money--a quarter or half a dollar--and maybe the men don't pay them even that.A girl tries to get her money in advance, but often she doesn't.And as they have to dress better than we do, and live 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 Imade, 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 Iwouldn'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 impossible for her.She ate only when she could endure no longer.This starvation no doubt saved her from illness; but at the same time it drained her strength.Her vitality had been going down, a little each day--lower and lower.The poverty which had infuriated her at first was now acting upon her like a soothing poison.The reason she had not risen to revolt was this slow and subtle poison that explains the inertia of the tenement poor from babyhood.To be spirited one must have health or a nervous system diseased in some of the ways that cause constant irritation.The disease called poverty is not an irritant, but an anesthetic.If Susan had been born to that life, her naturally vivacious temperament would have made her gay in unconscious wretchedness; as it was, she knew her own misery and suffered from it keenly--at times hideously--yet was rapidly losing the power to revolt.
Perhaps it was the wind--yes, it must have been the wind with its threat of winter--that roused her sluggish blood, that whipped thought into action.Anything--anything would be right, if it promised escape.Right--wrong! Hypocritical words for comfortable people!
That Friday night, after her supper of half-cooked corn meal and tea, she went instantly to work at washing out clothes.
Mrs.Tucker spent the evening gossiping with the janitress, came in about midnight.As usual she was full to the brim with news of misery--of jobs lost, abandoned wives, of abused children, of poisoning from rotten "fresh" food or from "embalmed" stuff in cans, of sickness and yet more sickness, of maiming accidents, of death--news that is the commonplace of tenement life.She loved to tell these tales with all the harrowing particulars and to find in each some evidence of the goodness of God to herself.Often Susan could let her run on and on without listening.But not that night.She resisted the impulse to bid her be silent, left the room and stood at the hall window.When she returned Mrs.Tucker was in bed, was snoring in a tranquillity that was the reverse of contagious.
With her habitual cheerfulness she had adapted herself to her changed condition without fretting.She had become as ragged and as dirty as her neighbors; she so wrought upon Susan's sensibilities, blunted though they were, that the girl would have been unable to sleep in the same bed if she had not always been tired to exhaustion when she lay down.But for that matter only exhaustion could have kept her asleep in that vermin-infested hole.Even the fiercest swarms of the insects that flew or ran or crawled and bit, even the filthy mice squeaking as they played upon the covers or ran over the faces of the sleepers, did not often rouse her.