第231章

As she turned he was advancing.His figure, tall and slim and straight, had the ease of movement which proclaims the man who has been everywhere and so is at home anywhere.He held out a card."I wish to see you on business.You can come at three this afternoon?""Yes," said Susan.

"Thanks," said he, bowing and returning to the table.She went on into the hall, the card between her fingers.At the elevator, she stood staring at the name--Robert Brent--as if it were an inscription in a forgotten language.She was so absorbed, so dazed that she did not ring the bell.The car happened to stop at that floor; she entered as if it were dark.And, in the street, she wandered many blocks down Broadway before she realized where she was.

She left the elevated and walked eastward through Grand Street.

She was filled with a new and profound dissatisfaction.She felt like one awakening from a hypnotic trance.The surroundings, inanimate and animate, that had become endurable through custom abruptly resumed their original aspect of squalor and ugliness of repulsion and tragedy.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.When she saw this picture in the department store, she felt at once a sympathy between that woman and herself, felt she was for the first time seeing another soul like her own, one that would have understood her strange sense of innocence in the midst of her own defiled and depraved self--a core of unsullied nature.

Everyone else in the world would have mocked at this notion of a something within--a true self to which all that seemed to be her own self was as external as her clothing; this woman of the photograph would understand.So, there she hung--Susan's one prized possession.

The question of dressing for this interview with Brent was most important.Susan gave it much thought before she began to dress, changed her mind again and again in the course of dressing.Through all her vicissitudes she had never lost her interest in the art of dress or her skill at it--and despite the unfavorable surroundings she had steadily improved; any woman anywhere would instantly have recognized her as one of those few favored and envied women who know how to get together a toilet.She finally chose the simplest of the half dozen summer dresses she had made for herself--a plain white lawn, with a short skirt.It gave her an appearance of extreme youth, despite her height and the slight stoop in her shoulders--a mere drooping that harmonized touchingly with the young yet weary expression of her face.To go with the dress she had a large hat of black rough straw with a very little white trimming on it.With this large black hat bewitchingly set upon her gracefully-done dark wavy hair, her sad, dreamy eyes, her pallid skin, her sweet-bitter mouth with its rouged lips seemed to her to show at their best.She felt that nothing was quite so effective for her skin as a white dress.

In other colors--though she did not realize--the woman of bought kisses showed more distinctly--never brazenly as in most of the girls, but still unmistakably.In white she took on a glamour of melancholy--and the human countenance is capable of no expression so universally appealing as the look of melancholy that suggests the sadness underlying all life, the pain that pays for pleasure, the pain that pays and gets no pleasure, the sorrow of the passing of all things, the faint foreshadow of the doom awaiting us all.She washed the rouge from her lips, studied the effect in the glass."No," she said aloud, "without it I feel like a hypocrite--and I don't look half so well." And she put the rouge on again--the scarlet dash drawn startlingly across her strange, pallid face.