She smiled, shrugged her shoulders.
Sperry—small and thin, a weather-beaten, wooden face suggesting Mr. Punch, sly keen eyes, theater in every tone and gesture Sperry pushed the scenario hastily to completion and was so successful with Fitzalan that on Sunday afternoon he brought two hundred and fifty dollars, Spenser's half of the advance money.
"Didn't I tell you!" said Spenser to Susan, in triumph. "We'll move at once. Go pack your traps and put them in a carriage, and by the time you're back here Sperry and the nurses will have me ready."
It was about three when Susan got to her room. Clara heard her come in and soon appeared, bare feet in mules, hair hanging every which way. Despite the softening effect of the white nightdress and of the framing of abundant hair, her face was hard and coarse. She had been drunk on liquor and on opium the night before, and the effects were wearing off. As she was only twenty years old, the hard coarse look would withdraw before youth in a few hours; it was there only temporarily as a foreshadowing of what Clara would look like in five years or so.
"Hello, Lorna," said she. "Gee, what a bun my fellow and I had on last night! Did you hear us scrapping when we came in about five o'clock?"
"No," replied Susan. "I was up late and had a lot to do, and was kept at the hospital all day. I guess I must have fallen asleep."
"He gave me an awful beating," pursued Clara. "But I got one good crack at him with a bottle." She laughed. "I don't think he'll be doing much flirting till his cheek heals up. He looks a sight!" She opened her nightdress and showed Susan a deep blue-black mark on her left breast. "I wonder if I'll get cancer from that?" said she. "It'd be just my rotten luck. I've heard of several cases of it lately, and my father kicked my mother there, and she got cancer. Lord, how she did suffer!"
Susan shivered, turned her eyes away. Her blood surged with joy that she had once more climbed up out of this deep, dark wallow where the masses of her fellow beings weltered in darkness and drunkenness and disease—was up among the favored ones who, while they could not entirely escape the great ills of life, at least had the intelligence and the means to mitigate them. How fortunate that few of these unhappy ones had the imagination to realize their own wretchedness! "I don't care what becomes of me," Clara was saying. "What is there in it for me? I can have a good time only as long as my looks last—and that's true of every woman, ain't it? What's a woman but a body? Ain't I right?"
"That's why I'm going to stop being a woman as soon as ever I can," said Susan.
"Why, you're packing up!" cried Clara.