"You mock at that, my lovely young sister. Your lips are painted, and they sneer. But you know I'm right—yes, you show in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! The wages of sin is death! Isn't that so, sister?"
Susan shook her head.
"Speak the truth, sister! God is watching you. The wages of sin is death!"
"The wages of weakness is death," retorted Susan. "But—the wages of sin—well, it's sometimes a house in Fifth Avenue."
And then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the little crowd and hurried across into Eighth Street. In the deep shadow of the front of Cooper Union she paused, as the meaning of her own impulsive words came to her. The wages of sin! And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was exactly as Burlingham had explained. He had said that, whether for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. Strong!
What a good teacher he had been—one of the rare kind that not only said things interestingly but also said them so that you never forgot. How badly she had learned!
She strolled on through Eighth Street, across Third Avenue and into Second Avenue. It was ten o'clock. The effects of the liquor she had drunk had worn away. In so much wandering she had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end. She was less than half an hour from her life in the Tenderloin; it was as completely in her past as it would ever be. The cards had once more been shuffled; a new deal was on.
A new deal. What? To fly to another city—that meant another Palmer, or the miseries of the unprotected woman of the streets, or slavery to the madman of what the French with cruel irony call a maison de joie. To return to work——
What was open to her, educated as the comfortable classes educate their women? Work meant the tenements. She loathed the fast life, but not as she loathed vermin-infected tenements. To toil all day at a monotonous task, the same task every day and all day long! To sleep at night with Tucker and the vermin! To her notion the sights and sounds and smells and personal contacts of the tenements were no less vicious; were—for her at least—far more degrading than anything in the Tenderloin and its like. And there she got money to buy whiskey that whirled her almost endurably, sometimes even gayly, over the worst things—money to buy hours, whole days of respite that could be spent in books, in dreams and plannings, in the freedom of a clean and comfortable room, or at the theater or concert. There were degrees in horror; she was paying a hateful price, but not so hateful as she had paid when she worked. The wages of shame were not so hard earned as the wages of toil, were larger, brought her many of the things she craved. The wages of toil brought her nothing but the right to bare existence in filth and depravity and darkness. Also, she felt that if she were tied down to some dull and exhausting employment, she would be settled and done for. In a few years she would be an old woman, with less wages or flung out diseased or maimed—to live on and on like hundreds of wretched old creatures adrift everywhere in the tenement streets. No, work had nothing to offer her except "respectability." And what a mocking was "respectability," in rags and filth! Besides, what had she, the outcast born, to do with this respectability?
No—not work—never again. So long as she was roving about, there was hope and chance somehow to break through into the triumphant class that ruled the world, that did the things worth while—wore the good clothes, lived in the good houses, ate the good food, basked in the sunshine of art.