This wind of Broadway--this first warning of
winter--it was hissing in her ears: "Take hold! Winter is
coming! Take hold!"
Summer and winter--fiery heat and brutal cold. Like the devils
in the poem, the poor--the masses, all but a few of the human
race--were hurried from fire to ice, to vary their torment and
to make it always exquisite.
To shelter herself for a moment she paused at a spot that
happened to be protected to the south by a projecting sidewalk
sign. She was facing, with only a tantalizing sheet of glass
between, a display of winter underclothes on wax figures. To
show them off more effectively the sides and the back of the
window were mirrors. Susan's gaze traveled past the figures to
a person she saw standing at full length before her. "Who is
that pale, stooped girl?" she thought. "How dreary and sad she
looks! How hard she is fighting to make her clothes look
decent, when they aren't! She must be something like me--only
much worse off." And then she realized that she was gazing at
her own image, was pitying her own self. The room she and Mrs.
Tucker and the old scrubwoman occupied was so dark, even with
its one little gas jet lighted, that she was able to get only
a faint look at herself in the little cracked and water-marked
mirror over its filthy washstand--filthy because the dirt was so
ground in that only floods of water and bars of soap could have
cleaned down to its original surface.
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