Etta, leaving on a later train, was even more depressed about Susan's heart. She wept hysterically, wished Susan to do the same; but Susan stood out firmly against a scene, and would not have it that Etta was shamefully deserting her, as Etta tearfully accused herself. "You're going to be happy," she said. "And I'm not so selfish as to be wretched about it. And don't you worry a minute on my account. I'm better off in every way than I've ever been. I'll get on all right."
"I know you gave up John to help me with August. I know you mean to break off everything. Oh, Lorna, you mustn't—you mustn't."
"Don't talk nonsense," was Susan's unsatisfactory reply.
When it came down to the last embrace and the last kiss, Etta did feel through Susan's lips and close encircling arms a something that dried up her hysterical tears and filled her heart with an awful aching. It did not last long. No matter how wildly shallow waters are stirred, they soon calm and murmur placidly on again. The three who had left her would have been amazed could they have seen her a few minutes after Etta's train rolled out of the Union Station. The difference between strong natures and weak is not that the strong are free from cowardice and faint-heartedness, from doubt and foreboding, from love and affection, but that they do not stay down when they are crushed down, stagger up and on.
Susan hurried to the room they had helped her find the day before—a room in a house where no questions were asked or answered. She locked herself in and gave way to the agonies of her loneliness. And when her grief had exhausted her, she lay upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life endurable, even of hope. For the first time in her life she thought of suicide—not suicide the vague possibility, not suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all griefs—suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst problem destiny can put to man.
She saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it. "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.