TOWARD half-past ten the next day, a few minutes after Rod left for the theater, she was in the bathroom cleaning the coffee machine.There came a knock at the door of the sitting-room bedroom.Into such disorder had her mood of depression worried her nerves that she dropped the coffee machine into the washbowl and jumped as if she were seeing a ghost.Several dire calamities took vague shape in her mind, then the image of Freddie Palmer, smiling sweetly, cruelly.
She wavered only a moment, went to the door, and after a brief hesitation that still further depressed her about herself she opened it.The maid--a good-natured sloven who had become devoted to Susan because she gave her liberal fees and made her no extra work--was standing there, in an attitude of suppressed excitement.Susan laughed, for this maid was a born agitator, a person who is always trying to find a thrill or to put a thrill into the most trivial event.
"What is it now, Annie?" Susan asked.
"Mr.Spenser--he's gone, hasn't he?"
"Yes--a quarter of an hour ago."
Annie drew a breath of deep relief."I was sure he had went,"said she, producing from under her apron a note."I saw it was in a gentleman's writing, so I didn't come up with it till he was out of the way, though the boy brought it a little after nine.""Oh, bother!" exclaimed Susan, taking the note.
"Well, Mrs.Spenser, I've had my lesson," replied Annie, apologetic but firm."When I first came to New York, green as the grass that grows along the edge of the spring, what does I do but go to work and take up a note to a lady when her husband was there! Next thing I knew he went to work and hauled her round the floor by the hair and skinned out--yes, beat it for good.And my madam says to me, `Annie, you're fired.Never give a note to a lady when her gent is by or to a gent when his lady's by.That's the first rule of life in gay New York.' And you can bet I never have since--nor never will."Susan had glanced at the address on the note, had recognized the handwriting of Brent's secretary.Her heart had straightway sunk as if the foreboding of calamity had been realized.As she stood there uncertainly, Annie seized the opportunity to run on and on.Susan now said absently, "Thank you.Very well," and closed the door.It was a minute or so before she tore open the envelope with an impatient gesture and read:
DEAR MRS.SPENSER:
Mr.Brent requests me to ask you not to come until further notice.It may be sometime before he will be free to resume.
Yours truly, JOHN C.GARVEY.
It was a fair specimen of Garvey's official style, with which she had become acquainted--the style of the secretary who has learned by experience not to use frills or flourishes but to convey his message in the fewest and clearest words.Had it been a skillfully worded insult Susan, in this mood of depression and distorted mental vision, could not have received it differently.She dropped to a chair at the table and stared at the five lines of neat handwriting until her eyes became circled and her face almost haggard.Precisely as Rod had described! After a long, long time she crumpled the paper and let it fall into the waste-basket.Then she walked up and down the room--presently drifted into the bathroom and resumed cleaning the coffee machine.Every few moments she would pause in the task--and in her dressing afterwards--would be seized by the fear, the horror of again being thrust into that hideous underworld.What was between her and it, to save her from being flung back into its degradation? Two men on neither of whom she could rely.Brent might drop her at any time--perhaps had already dropped her.As for Rod--vain, capricious, faithless, certain to become an unendurable tyrant if he got her in his power--Rod was even less of a necessity than Brent.What a dangerous situation was hers!
How slender her chances of escape from another catastrophe.
She leaned against wall or table and was shaken by violent fits of shuddering.She felt herself slipping--slipping.It was all she could do to refrain from crying out.In those moments, no trace of the self-possessed Susan the world always saw.Her fancy went mad and ran wild.She quivered under the actuality of coarse contacts--Mrs.Tucker in bed with her--the men who had bought her body for an hour--the vermin of the tenements--the brutal hands of policemen.
Then with an exclamation of impatience or of anger she would shake herself together and go resolutely on--only again to relapse."Because I so suddenly cut off the liquor and the opium," she said.It was the obvious and the complete explanation.But her heart was like lead, and her sky like ink.This note, the day after having tried her out as a possibility for the stage and as a woman.She stared down at the crumpled note in the wast-basket.That note--it was herself.He had crumpled her up and thrown her into the waste-basket, where she no doubt belonged.