useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he
ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of
him in that way. Although intelligence, indeed, virtue of every
kind, is expected of tenement house people--and is needed by
them beyond any other condition of humanity--they are
unfortunately merely human, are tainted of all human weaknesses.
They lack, for instance, discrimination. So, it never occurred
to them that Tom Brashear was the sole reason why the Brashears
lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to
the ferocious and incessant downward pressure.

But for one thing the Brashears would have been going up in the
world. That thing was old Tom's honesty. The restaurant gave
good food and honest measure. Therefore, the margin of profit
was narrow--too narrow. He knew what was the matter. He mocked
at himself for being "such a weak fool" when everybody else with
the opportunity and the intelligence was getting on by yielding
to the compulsion of the iron rule of dishonesty in business.
But he remained honest--therefore, remained in the working
class, instead of rising among its exploiters.

"If I didn't drink, I'd kill myself," said old Tom to Susan,
when he came to know her well and to feel that from her he could
get not the mere blind admiration the family gave him but
understanding and sympathy. "Whenever anybody in the working
class has any imagination," he explained, "he either kicks his
way out of it into capitalist or into criminal--or else he takes
to drink. I ain't mean enough to be either a capitalist or a
criminal. So, I've got to drink."

Susan only too soon began to appreciate from her own experience
what he meant.

In the first few days the novelty pleased her, made her think
she was going to be contented. The new friends and
acquaintances, different from any she had known, the new sights,
the new way of living--all this interested her, even when it
shocked one or many of her senses and sensibilities. But the
novelty of folding and pasting boxes, of the queer new kind of
girls who worked with her, hardly survived into the second week.
She saw that she was among a people where the highest known
standard--the mode of life regarded by them as the acme of
elegance and bliss--the best they could conceive was far, far
below what she had been brought up to believe the scantest
necessities of respectable and civilized living. She saw this
life f