now. If any habits ever had time to fix upon her, they would have operated here. Habits are peculiar things. They will drive the really non-religious… - Theodore Dreiser

He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.

"What old illusion of hope is not here forever repeated! Says the soul of the toiler
to itself, "I shall soon be free. I shall be in the ways and the hosts of the merry. The
streets, the lamp, the lighted chamber set for dining are for me. The theatres, the halls,
the parties, the ways of rest and the paths of song — these are mine in the night." Though
all humanity be still enclosed in the shops, the thrill runs abroad. It is in the air. The
dullest feel something which they may not always express or describe. It is the lifting of
the burden of toil."

Well, here is one who, whatever her defects, probably does what she believes as nearly as possible.