Etta shook her head. "No," said she without any show of sentiment, but like one stating an unalterable fact. "I've got to stay on with you. I can't live without you. I don't want to go down. I want to go up."
"Up!" Susan smiled bitterly.
Silence fell between them, and Susan planned for the new conditions. She did not speak until Etta said, "What ever will we do?"
"We've got to give up the furniture. Thank goodness, we've paid only two-fifty on it."
"Yes, it's got to go," said Etta.
"And we've got to pay Mrs. Quinlan the six we owe her and get out tonight. We'll go up to the top floor—up to Mrs. Cassatt. She takes sleepers. Then—we'll see."
An hour later they had moved; for Mrs. Quinlan was able to find two lodgers to take the rooms at once. They were established with Mrs. Cassatt, had a foul and foul-smelling bed and one-half of her back room; the other half barely contained two even dirtier and more malodorous cots, in one of which slept Mrs. Cassatt's sixteen-year-old daughter Kate, in the other her fourteen-year-old son Dan. For these new quarters and the right to cook their food on the Cassatt stove the girls agreed to pay three dollars and a half a week—which left them three dollars and a half a week for food and clothing—and for recreation and for the exercise of the virtue of thrift which the comfortable so assiduously urge upon the poor.
CHAPTER XXI
EACH girl now had with her at all times everything she possessed in the world—a toothbrush, a cake of castile soap, the little money left out of the week's wages, these three items in the pocket of her one skirt, a cheap dark blue cloth much wrinkled and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade; an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's lacking one button, Etta's lacking three and having a patch under the right arm.
Yet they often laughed and joked with each other, with their fellow-workers. You might have said their hearts were light; for so eager are we to believe our fellow-beings comfortable, a smile of poverty's face convinces us straightway that it is as happy as we, if not happier. There would have been to their mirth a little more than mere surface and youthful ability to find some jest in the most crushing tragedy if only they could have kept themselves clean. The lack of sufficient food was a severe trial, for both had voracious appetites; Etta was tormented by visions of quantity, Susan by visions of quality as well as of quantity. But only at meal times, or when they had to omit a meal entirely, were they keenly distressed by the food question. The cold was a still severer trial; but it was warm in the factory and it was warm in Mrs. Cassatt's flat, whose windows were never opened from closing in of winter until spring came round. The inability to keep clean was the trial of trials.