She sat at the table, with the shutters closed against the
fiery light of the summer afternoon sun. That hideous
unacceptable heat! With eyelids drooped--deep and dark were the
circles round them--she listened to the roar of the city, a
savage sound like the clamor of a multitude of famished wild
beasts. A city like the City of Destruction in "Pilgrim's
Progress"--a city where of all the millions, but a few
thousands were moving toward or keeping in the sunlight of
civilization. The rest, the swarms of the cheap boarding
houses, cheap lodging houses, tenements--these myriads were
squirming in darkness and squalor, ignorant and never to be
less ignorant, ill fed and never to be better fed, clothed in
pitiful absurd rags or shoddy vulgar attempts at finery, and
never to be better clothed. She would not be of those! She
would struggle on, would sink only to mount. She would work;
she would try to do as nearly right as she could. And in the
end she must triumph. She would get at least a good part of
what her soul craved, of what her mind craved, of what her
heart craved.
The heat of this tenement room! The heat to which poverty was
exposed naked and bound! Would not anyone be justified in
doing anything--yes, _anything_--to escape from this fiend?
II
ELLEN, the maid, slept across the hall from Susan, in a closet
so dirty that no one could have risked in it any article of
clothing with the least pretension to cleanness.
Pages:
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590