A stranger--the
ordinary, unobservant, feebly imaginative person, going along
those streets would have seen nothing but tawdriness and
poverty. Susan, experienced, imaginative, saw _all_--saw what
another would have seen only after it was pointed out, and even
then but dimly. And that day her vision was no longer staled
and deadened by familiarity, but with vision fresh and with
nerves acute. The men--the women--and, saddest, most tragic of
all, the children! When she entered her room her reawakened
sensitiveness, the keener for its long repose, for the enormous
unconscious absorption of impressions of the life about
her--this morbid sensitiveness of the soul a-clash with its
environment reached its climax. As she threw open the door,
she shrank back before the odor--the powerful, sensual, sweet
odor of chypre so effective in covering the bad smells that
came up from other flats and from the noisome back yards. The
room itself was neat and clean and plain, with not a few
evidences of her personal taste--in the blending of colors, in
the selection of framed photographs on the walls. The one she
especially liked was the largest--a nude woman lying at full
length, her head supported by her arm, her face gazing straight
out of the picture, upon it a baffling expression--of sadness,
of cynicism, of amusement perhaps, of experience, yet of
innocence. It hung upon the wall opposite the door.
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