"I'll wait till my money's gone," thought she.Then she remembered Etta--how gentle and loving she was, how utterly she gave herself--for Susan was still far from the profound knowledge of character that enables us to disregard outward signs in measuring actualities."If I really weren't harder than Etta," her thoughts ran on reproachfully, "I'd not wait until the money went.I'd kill myself now, and have it over with." The truth was that if the position of the two girls had been reversed and Susan had loved Gulick as intensely as Etta professed and believed she loved him, still Susan would have given him up rather than have left Etta alone.And she would have done it without any sense of sacrifice.And it must be admitted that, whether or not there are those who deserve credit for doing right, certainly those who do right simply because they cannot do otherwise--the only trustworthy people--deserve no credit for it.
She counted her money--twenty-three dollars in bills, and some change.Redmond had given her fifty dollars each time they had gone shopping, and had made her keep the balance--his indirect way of adjusting the financial side.Twenty-three dollars meant perhaps two weeks' living.Well, she would live those two weeks decently and comfortably and then--bid life adieu unless something turned up--for back to the streets she would not go.
With Etta gone, with not a friend anywhere on earth, life was not worth the price she had paid for Etta and herself to the drunken man.Her streak of good fortune in meeting Redmond had given her no illusions; from Mabel Connemora, from what she herself had heard and seen--and experienced--she knew the street woman's life, and she could not live that life for herself alone.She could talk about it to Redmond tranquilly.She could think about it in the abstract, could see how other women did it, and how those who had intelligence might well survive and lift themselves up in it.But do it she could not.So she resolved upon suicide, firmly believing in her own resolve.And she was not one to deceive herself or to shrink from anything whatsoever.Except the insane, only the young make these resolves and act upon them; for the young have not yet learned to value life, have not yet fallen under life's sinister spell that makes human beings cling more firmly and more cravenly to it as they grow older.The young must have something--some hope, however fanatic and false--to live for.They will not tarry just to live.And in that hour Susan had lost hope.
She took off her street dress and opened her trunk to get a wrapper and bedroom slippers.As she lifted the lid, she saw an envelope addressed "Lorna"; she remembered that Redmond had locked and strapped the trunk.She tore the end from the envelope, looked in.Some folded bills; nothing more.She sat on the floor and counted two twenties, five tens, two fives--a hundred dollars! She looked dazedly at the money--gave a cry of delight--sprang to her feet, with a change like the startling shift from night to day in the tropics.
"I can pay!" she cried."I can pay!"
Bubbling over with smiles and with little laughs, gay as even champagne and the release from the vile prison of the slums had made her, she with eager hands took from the trunk her best clothes--the jacket and skirt of dark gray check she had bought for thirty dollars at Shillito's and had had altered to her figure and her taste; the blouse of good quality linen with rather a fancy collar; the gray leather belt with a big oxidized silver buckle; her only pair of silk stockings; the pair of high-heeled patent leather shoes--the large black hat with a gray feather curling attractively round and over its brim.The hat had cost only fourteen dollars because she had put it together herself; if she had bought it made, she would have paid not less than thirty dollars.
All these things she carefully unpacked and carefully laid out.
Then she thoroughly brushed her hair and did it up in a graceful pompadour that would go well with the hat.She washed away the traces of her outburst of grief, went over her finger nails, now almost recovered from the disasters incident to the life of manual labor.She went on to complete her toilet, all with the same attention to detail--a sure indication, in one so young, of a desire to please some specific person.When she had the hat set at the satisfactory angle and the veil wound upon it and draped over her fresh young face coquettishly, she took from her slender store of gloves a fresh gray pair and, as she put them on, stood before the glass examining herself.
There was now not a trace of the tenement working girl of a week and a day before.Here was beauty in bloom, fresh and alluring from head to narrow, well-booted feet.More than a hint of a fine color sense--that vital quality, if fashion, the conventional, is to be refined and individualized into style, the rare--more than a hint of color sense showed in the harmony of the pearl gray in the big feather, the pearl gray in the collar of the blouse, and the pearl white of her skin.Susan had indeed returned to her own class.She had left it, a small-town girl with more than a suggestion of the child in eyes and mouth;she had returned to it, a young woman of the city, with that look in her face which only experience can give--experience that has resulted in growth.She locked all her possessions away in her trunk--all but her money; that she put in her stockings--seventy-five dollars well down in the right leg, the rest of the bills well down in the left leg; the two dollars or so in change was all she intrusted to the pocketbook she carried.She cast a coquettish glance down at her charmingly arrayed feet--a harmless glance of coquetry that will be condemned by those whose physical vanity happens to center elsewhere.After this glance she dropped her skirts--and was ready.
By this time dusk had fallen, and it was nearly six o'clock.As she came out of the house she glanced toward the west--the instinctive gesture of people who live in rainy climates.Her face brightened; she saw an omen in the long broad streak of reddened evening sky.
