But she could not overcome her temperament which had at this feeble and false opportunity at once resented itself.She knew perfectly that therein was the whole cause of her failure to make the success she ought to have made when she came up from the tenements, and again when she fell into the clutches of Freddie Palmer.But it is one thing to know; it is another thing to do.Susan ignored the attempts of the men; she pretended not to understand Lange when they set him on to intercede with her for them.She saw that she was once more drifting to disaster--and that she had not long to drift.She was exasperated against herself; she was disgusted with herself.But she drifted on.
Growing seedier looking every day, she waited, defying the plain teachings of experience.She even thought seriously of going to work.But the situation in that direction remained unchanged.She was seeing things, the reasons for things, more clearly now, as experience developed her mind.She felt that to get on in respectability she ought to have been either more or less educated.If she had been used from birth to conditions but a step removed from savagery, she might have been content with what offered, might even have felt that she was rising.Or if she had been bred to a good trade, and educated only to the point where her small earnings could have satisfied her desires, then she might have got along in respectability.But she had been bred a "lady"; a Chinese woman whose feet have been bound from babyhood until her fifteenth or sixteenth year--how long it would be, after her feet were freed, before she could learn to walk at all!--and would she ever be able to learn to walk well?
What is luxury for one is squalor for another; what is elevation for one degrades another.In respectability she could not earn what was barest necessity for her--what she was now getting at Lange's--decent shelter, passable food.Ejected from her own class that shelters its women and brings them up in unfitness for the unsheltered life, she was dropping as all such women must and do drop--was going down, down, down--striking on this ledge and that, and rebounding to resume her ever downward course.
She saw her own plight only too vividly.Those whose outward and inward lives are wide apart get a strong sense of dual personality.It was thus with Susan.There were times when she could not believe in the reality of her external life.
She often glanced through the columns on columns, pages on pages of "want ads" in the papers--not with the idea of answering them, for she had served her apprenticeship at that, but simply to force herself to realize vividly just how matters stood with her.Those columns and pages of closely printed offerings of work! Dreary tasks, all of them--tasks devoid of interest, of personal sense of usefulness, tasks simply to keep degrading soul in degenerating body, tasks performed in filthy factories, in foul-smelling workrooms and shops, in unhealthful surroundings.And this, throughout civilization, was the "honest work" so praised--by all who don't do it, but live pleasantly by making others do it.Wasn't there something in the ideas of Etta's father, old Tom Brashear? Couldn't sensible, really loving people devise some way of making most tasks less repulsive, of lessening the burdens of those tasks that couldn't be anything but repulsive? Was this stupid system, so cruel, so crushing, and producing at the top such absurd results as flashy, insolent autos and silly palaces and overfed, overdressed women, and dogs in jeweled collars, and babies of wealth brought up by low menials--was this system really the best?
"If they'd stop canting about `honest work' they might begin to get somewhere."In the effort to prevent her downward drop from beginning again she searched all the occupations open to her.She could not find one that would not have meant only the most visionary prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset and hope--her personal appearance.And she resolved that she would not even endanger it ever again.The largest part of the little capital she took away from Forty-third Street had gone to a dentist who put in several fillings of her back teeth.