"Well, he ought to be nice—as pa says, getting richer and richer, and driving the girls he robs to marry men they hate or to pick up a living in the gutter."
Susan felt that she owed her benefactor a strong protest. "Maybe I'm foolish," said she, "but I'm awful glad he's got that place and can give me work."
Etta was neither convinced nor abashed. "You don't understand things in our class," replied she. "Pa says it was the kind of grateful thinking and talking you've just done that's made him poor in his old age. He says you've either got to whip or be whipped, rob or be robbed—and that the really good honest people are the fools who take the losing side. But he says, too, he'd rather be a fool and a failure than stoop to stamping on his fellow-beings and robbing them. And I guess he's right"—there Etta laughed—"though I'll admit I'd hate to be tempted with a chance to get up by stepping on somebody." She sighed. "And sometimes I can't help wishing pa had done some tramping and stamping. Why not? That's all most people are fit for—to be tramped and stamped on. Now, don't look so shocked. You don't understand. Wait till you've been at work a while."
Susan changed the subject. "I'm going to work at seven in the morning. . . . I might as well have gone today. I had a kind of an engagement I thought I was going to keep, but I've about decided I won't."
Etta watched with awe and delight the mysterious look in Susan's suddenly flushed face and abstracted eyes. After a time she ventured to interrupt with:
"You'll try living with us?"
"If you're quite sure—did you talk to your mother?"
"Mother'll be crazy about you. She wants anything that'll make me more contented. Oh, I do get so lonesome!"
Mrs. Brashear, a spare woman, much bent by monotonous work—which, however, had not bent her courage or her cheerfulness—made Susan feel at home immediately in the little flat. The tenement was of rather a superior class. But to Susan it seemed full of noisome smells, and she was offended by the halls littered with evidences of the uncleanness of the tenants. She did not then realize that the apparent superior cleanness and neatness of the better-off classes was really in large part only affected, that their secluded back doors and back ways gave them opportunity to hide their uncivilized habits from the world that saw only the front. However, once inside the Brashear flat, she had an instant rise of spirits.
"Isn't this nice?" exclaimed she as Etta showed her, at a glance from the sitting-room, the five small but scrupulously clean rooms. "I'll like it here!"