"You know the theater people. You might write a little play—a sketch—and you and I could act it in one of the ten-cent houses."
"That's not a bad idea!" exclaimed he. "A little comedy—about fifteen or twenty minutes." And he cast about for a plot, found the beginnings of one the ancient but ever acceptable commonplace of a jealous quarrel between two lovers—"I'll lay the scene in Fifth Avenue—there's nothing low life likes so much as high life." He sketched, she suggested. They planned until broad day, then fell asleep, she half sitting up, his head pillowed upon her lap.
She was awakened by a sense of a parching and suffocating heat. She started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. But a glance at him revealed the real cause. His face was fiery red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered, whispered, that indicated the delirium of a high fever. She had first seen it when she and the night porter broke into Burlingham's room in the Walnut Street House, in Cincinnati. She had seen it many a time since; for, while she herself had never been ill, she had been surrounded by illness all the time, and the commonest form of it was one of these fevers, outraged nature's frenzied rise against the ever denser swarms of enemies from without which the slums sent to attack her. Susan ran across the hall and roused Clara, who would watch while she went for a doctor. "You'd better get Einstein in Grand Street," Clara advised.
"Why not Sacci?" asked Susan.
"Our doctor doesn't know anything but the one thing—and he doesn't like to take other kinds of cases. No, get Einstein. . . . You know, he's like all of them—he won't come unless you pay in advance."
"How much?" asked Susan.
"Three dollars. I'll lend you if——"
"No—I've got it." She had eleven dollars and sixty cents in the world.
Einstein pronounced it a case of typhoid. "You must get him to the hospital at once."
Susan and Clara looked at each other in terror. To them, as to the masses everywhere, the hospital meant almost certain death; for they assumed—and they had heard again and again accusations which warranted it—that the public hospital doctors and nurses treated their patients with neglect always, with downright inhumanity often. Not a day passed without their hearing some story of hospital outrage upon poverty, without their seeing someone—usually some child—who was paying a heavy penalty for having been in the charity wards.