"As for the fast houses——" Rosa shuddered—"I was in one for a week. I ran away—it was the only way I could escape. I'd never tell any human being what I went through in that house. . . . Never!" She watched Susan's fine sympathetic face, and in a burst of confidence said: "One night the landlady sent me up with seventeen men. And she kept the seventeen dollars I made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken longshoreman gave me as a present. She said I owed it for board and clothes. In those houses, high and low, the girls always owes the madam. They haven't a stitch of their own to their backs."
The two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the other into the wind-swept canyon of Broadway—the majestic vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy extravagance. Finally Susan said:
"Do you ever think of killing yourself?"
"I thought I would," replied the other girl. "But I guess I wouldn't have. Everybody knows there's no hope, yet they keep on hopin'. And I've got pretty good health yet, and once in a while I have some fun. You ought to go to dances—and drink. You wouldn't be blue all the time, then."
"If it wasn't for the sun," said Susan.
"The sun?" inquired Rosa.
"Where I came from," explained Susan, "it rained a great deal, and the sky was covered so much of the time. But here in New York there is so much sun. I love the sun. I get desperate—then out comes the sun, and I say to myself, 'Well, I guess I can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'"
"I hadn't thought of it," said Rosa, "but the sun is a help."
That indefatigable New York sun! It was like Susan's own courage. It fought the clouds whenever clouds dared to appear and contest its right to shine upon the City of the Sun, and hardly a day was so stormy that for a moment at least the sun did not burst through for a look at its beloved.
For weeks Susan had eaten almost nothing. During her previous sojourn in the slums—the slums of Cincinnati, though they were not classed as slums—the food had seemed revolting. But she was less discriminating then. The only food she could afford now—the food that is the best obtainable for a majority of the inhabitants of any city—was simply impossible for her. She ate only when she could endure no longer. This starvation no doubt saved her from illness; but at the same time it drained her strength. Her vitality had been going down, a little each day—lower and lower. The poverty which had infuriated her at first was now acting upon her like a soothing poison. The reason she had not risen to revolt was this slow and subtle poison that explains the inertia of the tenement poor from babyhood. To be spirited one must have health or a nervous system diseased in some of the ways that cause constant irritation. The disease called poverty is not an irritant, but an anesthetic. If Susan had been born to that life, her naturally vivacious temperament would have made her gay in unconscious wretchedness; as it was, she knew her own misery and suffered from it keenly—at times hideously—yet was rapidly losing the power to revolt.