Susan Lenox: Her Fall and RisePhillips, David Graham
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Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise
Phillips, David Graham
Actresses -- Fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction; Women -- United States -- Fiction
Susan hurried to the room they had helped her find the day
before--a room in a house where no questions were asked or
answered. She locked herself in and gave way to the agonies of
her loneliness. And when her grief had exhausted her, she lay
upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though
her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life
endurable, even of hope. For the first time in her life she
thought of suicide--not suicide the vague possibility, not
suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and
intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all
griefs--suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst
problem destiny can put to man.
She saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it.
"I'll wait till my money's gone," thought she. Then she
remembered Etta--how gentle and loving she was, how utterly she
gave herself--for Susan was still far from the profound
knowledge of character that enables us to disregard outward
signs in measuring actualities. "If I really weren't harder than
Etta," her thoughts ran on reproachfully, "I'd not wait until
the money went. I'd kill myself now, and have it over with." The
truth was that if the position of the two girls had been
reversed and Susan had loved Gulick as intensely as Etta
professed and believed she loved him, still Susan would have
given him up rather than have left Etta alone. And she would
have done it without any sense of sacrifice. And it must be
admitted that, whether or not there are those who deserve credit
for doing right, certainly those who do right simply because
they cannot do otherwise--the only trustworthy people--deserve
no credit for it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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