Despite the softening effect of the
white nightdress and of the framing of abundant hair, her face
was hard and coarse. She had been drunk on liquor and on
opium the night before, and the effects were wearing off. As
she was only twenty years old, the hard coarse look would
withdraw before youth in a few hours; it was there only
temporarily as a foreshadowing of what Clara would look like
in five years or so.
"Hello, Lorna," said she. "Gee, what a bun my fellow and I
had on last night! Did you hear us scrapping when we came in
about five o'clock?"
"No," replied Susan. "I was up late and had a lot to do, and
was kept at the hospital all day. I guess I must have fallen
asleep."
"He gave me an awful beating," pursued Clara. "But I got one
good crack at him with a bottle." She laughed. "I don't
think he'll be doing much flirting till his cheek heals up.
He looks a sight!" She opened her nightdress and showed Susan
a deep blue-black mark on her left breast. "I wonder if I'll
get cancer from that?" said she. "It'd be just my rotten
luck. I've heard of several cases of it lately, and my father
kicked my mother there, and she got cancer. Lord, how she did
suffer!"
Susan shivered, turned her eyes away. Her blood surged with
joy that she had once more climbed up out of this deep, dark
wallow where the masses of her fellow beings weltered in
darkness and drunkenness and disease--was up among the favored
ones who, while they could not entirely escape the great ills
of life, at least had the intelligence and the means to
mitigate them.
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