And no money in it, at that. And
food and clothing prices going up and up. Meat and vegetables
two and three times what they was a few years ago. And rents!"
Mrs. Tucker threw up her hands.
"I must be going," said Susan. "Good-by."
She put out her hand, but Mrs. Tucker insisted on kissing her.
She crossed Washington Square, beautiful in the soft evening
light, and went up Fifth Avenue. She felt that she was
breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the
broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either
side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean,
happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. It
was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into
smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. She was
free--free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom,
infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the
fear of slavery closing in again. She had abandoned the old
toilet articles. She had only the clothes she was wearing, the
thirty-one dollars divided between her stockings, and the
two-dollar bill stuffed into the palm of her left glove.
She had walked but a few hundred feet. She had advanced into
a region no more prosperous to the eye than that she had been
working in every day. Yet she had changed her world--because
she had changed her point of view.
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