"SUSAN LENOX HER RISE AND FALL" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips David Graham)

big-eyed about it and him. Those of us who are naughty aren't
nearly so naughty as we like to think; nor are those of us who
are nice nearly so nice. Our virtues and our failings
are--perhaps to an unsuspected degree--the result of the
circumstances in which we are placed. The way to improve
individuals is to improve these circumstances; and the way to
start at improving the circumstances is by looking honestly and
fearlessly at things as they are. We must know our world and
ourselves before we can know what should be kept and what
changed. And the beginning of this wisdom is in seeing sex
relations rationally. Until that fundamental matter is brought
under the sway of good common sense, improvement in other directions
will be slow indeed. Let us stop lying--to others--to ourselves.

D.G.P.

July, 1908.



SUSAN LENOX
CHAPTER I

THE child's dead," said Nora, the nurse. It was the upstairs
sitting-room in one of the pretentious houses of Sutherland,
oldest and most charming of the towns on the Indiana bank of the
Ohio. The two big windows were open; their limp and listless
draperies showed that there was not the least motion in the
stifling humid air of the July afternoon. At the center of the
room stood an oblong table; over it were neatly spread several
thicknesses of white cotton cloth; naked upon them lay the body
of a newborn girl baby. At one side of the table nearer the
window stood Nora. Hers were the hard features and corrugated
skin popularly regarded as the result of a life of toil, but in
fact the result of a life of defiance to the laws of health. As
additional penalties for that same self-indulgence she had an
enormous bust and hips, thin face and arms, hollow,
sinew-striped neck. The young man, blond and smooth faced, at
the other side of the table and facing the light, was Doctor
Stevens, a recently graduated pupil of the famous Schulze of
Saint Christopher who as much as any other one man is
responsible for the rejection of hocus-pocus and the injection
of common sense into American medicine. For upwards of an hour
young Stevens, coat off and shirt sleeves rolled to his
shoulders, had been toiling with the lifeless form on the table.
He had tried everything his training, his reading and his
experience suggested--all the more or less familiar devices
similar to those indicated for cases of drowning. Nora had
watched him, at first with interest and hope, then with interest
alone, finally with swiftly deepening disapproval, as her