Your lips are
painted, and they sneer. But you know I'm right--yes, you show
in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! The wages
of sin is _death!_ Isn't that so, sister?"
Susan shook her head.
"Speak the truth, sister! God is watching you. The wages of
sin is _death!_"
"The wages of weakness is death," retorted Susan. "But--the
wages of sin--well, it's sometimes a house in Fifth Avenue."
And then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the
little crowd and hurried across into Eighth Street. In the
deep shadow of the front of Cooper Union she paused, as the
meaning of her own impulsive words came to her. The wages of
sin! And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was
exactly as Burlingham had explained. He had said that, whether
for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. Strong!
What a good teacher he had been--one of the rare kind that not
only said things interestingly but also said them so that you
never forgot. How badly she had learned!
She strolled on through Eighth Street, across Third Avenue and
into Second Avenue. It was ten o'clock. The effects of the
liquor she had drunk had worn away. In so much wandering she
had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a
traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end. She
was less than half an hour from her life in the Tenderloin; it
was as completely in her past as it would ever be.
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