Hq 
 N4 
 
,5S™ELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 091 209 340 
 
 
 DATE 
 
 DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 11,11. -L. 
 
 -__ Tifijl 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN U.SA 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://archive.org/details/cu31924091209340 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Henry Pelouze de Forest 
 Class of 188^ 
 
 J 
 
THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
THE GIRL THAT GOES 
 WRONG 
 
 By 
 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN 
 
 Author of "The House of Bondage,*' etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 1911 
 
Copyright^ 191 i» bv 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 New York 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Published November, igii 
 
 Second Printing, November. 1911 
 
 THE QUINN A BOOEN CO. PRESS 
 RAHWAY, H. i. 
 
SOLOMON SOLIS COHEN 
 
 PHYSICIAN AND FRIEND 
 
 BUT FOR WHOM MY WRITING-DAYS 
 
 HAD ENDED BEFORE THIS BOOK WAS UNDERTAKEN 
 
 /?. W. K. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CIIAPTEE 
 
 I. 
 
 Introduction .... 
 
 
 
 FAGS 
 
 I 
 
 II. 
 
 The Girl That Was Bad 
 
 
 
 • 13 
 
 III. 
 
 The Girl That Wanted Ermine . 
 
 
 
 • 25 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Girl That Studied Art 
 
 
 
 . 38 
 
 V. 
 
 The Father That Was Careful 
 
 
 
 . 48 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Girl That Wasn't Told 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Girl That Was Romantic . 
 
 
 
 73 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Girl That Was Weak . 
 
 
 
 85 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Girl That Went to See 
 
 
 
 98 
 
 X. 
 
 The Girl That Was Poor . 
 
 
 
 109 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Women That Serve 
 
 
 
 122 
 
 XII. 
 
 The Woman That Is Bohemian . 
 
 
 
 138 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Girl That Killed . 
 
 
 
 iSi 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Woman That Succeeded 
 
 
 
 166 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Girl That Was Hungry 
 
 
 
 183 
 
 XVI. 
 
 A Case of Retrogression 
 
 
 
 194 
 
 XVII. 
 
 "Those Things Which We Ought 
 Done" 
 
 TO 
 
 HAVi 
 
 207 
 
MARIA PERIPATETICA 
 
 Sad painted flower, cast unwist 
 
 Into Life's lap; poor face that Fate 
 
 Has mocked at, drunk to, smitten, kissed. 
 Until I read the rune thereof 
 
 With more in it to love than hate. 
 With more to pity than to love: — 
 
 What nights were thine; what morns were theirs 
 Whose sleep was incense, vital, rare. 
 
 Burned into ashes unawares 
 Before thy desecrated shrine; — 
 
 Thy barren bosom freed their care. 
 Because its milk was bitter wine. 
 
 Of all that loved and let thee go 
 
 Is there not one whose lips impressed 
 
 Their stamp upon thy memory so — 
 Or dark or fair, or black or white — 
 
 His eyes outsparkle all the rest. 
 
 The casual Antonies of the night? 
 
 Off all the mouths thy mouth hath drained. 
 Off all the breasts thy breasts have sought 
 
 And clung to, mad, desired, disdained — 
 In that long catalogue of dole 
 
 Is there not one who something taught. 
 His soul embracing thy lost soul? 
 
MARIA PERIPATETICA 
 
 That fair first lover on whose head 
 
 Thy maiden shame and passion place — ■ 
 
 Living and loving, or purged and dead — 
 So rich a crown of memory 
 
 That to thine inmost heart his face 
 A sinning saint seems — is it he? 
 
 Or is it some poor drunken fool. 
 
 Wiser than thou — God save the mark!- 
 In that salacious, brutal school 
 
 Where beasts, as thou and I are, sweat 
 Over the lessons in the Dark, 
 
 That thou recall'st with dear regret? 
 
 Perhaps some country lad, who came 
 Fresh from his home to town and thee, 
 
 Is closest, his the charmed name. 
 
 Who with the parting tears fresh shed. 
 
 With all his sweet virginity 
 Thy sacramental table spread. 
 
 My canker-eaten rose, what then? 
 
 My scape-goat of an outworn creed, 
 " All things," said Paul, " unto all men " — 
 
 So thou who with the setting sun 
 Forest nightly on the endless road. 
 
 To all men mistress, wife to none! 
 
 But mine to-night, though not to kiss! 
 
 I lay my head upon that breast 
 Whose scar our sisters' safety is. 
 
 And from our darkest misery 
 To beg thy mercy is my quest. 
 
 Lest that we perish utterly. 
 
MARIA PERIPATETICA 
 
 Forgive our women's scornful glance. 
 Our poor, pale, pure maids decorous, 
 
 Virgins by purse and circumstance ; 
 Forgive the tearing tusk and claw; 
 
 Forgive the law that made thee thus; — 
 Forgive the god that made the law. 
 
 R. W. K. 
 
THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THESE are not the sort of stories that I used 
 to try to write. They are not fiction at all. 
 I wish they were. I wish with all my heart 
 that these things which I have seen and these black 
 biographies which I have verified were but the visions 
 of a night of weeping, whereafter "joy cometh in 
 the morning." But the world — which means you and 
 me — has not so decided. That which I testify is 
 not " the whole truth," because we have not yet suffi- 
 ciently progressed to bear the pubhcation of truth 
 entire ; the worst must still be left to your imagination. 
 And yet my testimony is, I assure you, " the truth 
 and nothing but the truth." 
 
 Why, if it be so terrible, should I ask you to read 
 it? I shall try to make that clear in a few words. 
 
 I n New York City alone there are, according to 
 the last authentic figures that came to my hand, and 
 not counting those who break the conventional ethical 
 code in secret, -;o.p(j)(3^ pr^t itutes. The life of such 
 women in sucITatrade — the calculation is as certain 
 as those of the insurance companies — averages five 
 years. This means that, for New York alone, there 
 must be secured 6,000 new public women every year/ 
 t=rand every year that number is secured. From the , 
 
2 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 most conservative accounts obtainable, it is safe to 
 say that, in all of our large American cities and most 
 of our small ones, there is one prostitute to every one 
 hundred and sixty of the populatfon — men, women, 
 and children. About one-half of these prostitutes 
 ""come from the rural districts, and the majority are 
 native-born. 
 
 Now, do you see.why, I ask you to consider this 
 problem ? You may believe in the aTjolitTorTbT^pros- 
 titution or in its supervision by the state. You may 
 believe in the still commonly preached standard of 
 sex-morality, or you may believe in the standard both 
 commonly reprobated in public speech and commonly 
 advocated in private action. However you regard 
 these matters, concerning the forcing of girls into 
 prostitution there can be no two opinions among fair- 
 minded people. It makes no difference whether the 
 force be applied by economic circumstance, by brute 
 strength, or by trickery and seduction: that force 
 should be employed is abominable. 
 
 Do you consider that you have no responsibility 
 for what constantly happens to girls at some place 
 distant from that in which you live? You have a re- 
 sponsibility ; but, for the present, we shall waive that. 
 Do you think that you have an excuse for not greatly 
 caring about the fate of immigrant women in the 
 United States? You have no excuse; but, for the 
 present, we shall waive that lack of excuse also. Let 
 us assume the selfish attitude: I ask you to consider 
 this problem because it concerns your own daughters 
 and sons, your own sons-in-law and brothers-in-law, 
 your own sister, your own sweethearts, your own body 
 and soul. 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 When Leslie's Weekly courageously opened its 
 columns to the serial publication of the stories now 
 gathered into this volume, I said that, with all neces- 
 sary changes of names, dates, and places carefully 
 effected, and with the composite frequently presented 
 as the individual, what I have told is a part of what 
 I have seen with my own eyes. Nevertheless, I do not 
 ask you to accept my unsupported testimony. It 
 would be possible to summon any number of corrobo- 
 rating witnesses; yet, if you doubt that the conditions 
 that I am to speak of extend from one end of the 
 country to the other, then : 
 
 Write to the New York Probation Society for its 
 first report and read the statement concerning condi- 
 tions in New York made by District Attorney Charles 
 S. Whitman. 
 
 Secure a copy of the latest report of the Vice Com- 
 mission of the City of Chicago. 
 
 Read some of the publications of the American 
 Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. 
 
 Write to your Congressman for a copy of Senate 
 Document No. 196, and note the testimony of a 
 corps of Government experts whose investigations ex- 
 tended from one end of the country to the other. 
 
 (There are a few of my witnesses. As, however, the 
 stories that they corroborate are, after all, the results 
 of personal investigations, a personal explanation 
 should, perhaps, precede those stories. 
 
 My own interest in the problem of prostitution 
 began a good many years ago when I was a reporter 
 on a Philadelphia newspaper. One bitterly cold 
 night, or rather morning, I had been detained at my 
 office until two o'clock. As I stepped into the street I 
 
4 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 was, I recall, nearly driven against the side of the 
 building by the gale that was blowing. The sleet 
 cut at my cheeks and the pavement was like the sur- 
 face of a frozen pond. I noticed that the thorough- 
 fare was almost deserted and yet, just under a sput- 
 tering electric light, I was accosted by a lonely woman. 
 
 There was no mistaking her trade, and there was 
 nothing attractive about this practitioner. Her ringed 
 eyes were hard, her rouged face was prematurely 
 old, and her red mouth was cruel. 
 
 I asked her why she was working so late and in 
 such weather. 
 
 " I'm doin' it," she said — and I can still hear her 
 hollow voice — " because I need some more money on 
 my kid's boardin'-school bill. The bill's got to be 
 paid to-morrow." 
 
 That woman told me a story that I subsequently 
 investigated and found true. She had been inveigled 
 from a country town, taken to the city, and then, by 
 the man that had said he loved her, turned upon the 
 street. When her child was four years old, she had 
 taken the little girl to a certain educational institu- 
 tion — not a charitable affair — and the officials of that 
 institution, with whom the woman was perfectly 
 frank, had agreed to take the child and educate her 
 on three conditions : The woman must consent never 
 to see her daughter again, she must consent to having 
 her daughter brought up in the belief that the mother 
 was dead, and she must pay the bills regularly. 
 
 That mother's love proved itself absolutely unself- 
 ish — the woman kept her bargain. 
 
 This was the incident that started me on my in- 
 quiries. After some years of work in other cities, I 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 rented rooms in an East Side tenement house, on the 
 island of Manhattan, on the outskirts of the district 
 In which lived many of the people of whom I was 
 to write and from which still more of their sort are 
 daily recruited. Here my wife and I pursued our 
 researches in a living medium. 
 
 I studied these people and lived among them; but 
 not as a patron, nor as a customer, not as a slaver on 
 the one hand, or a benefactor on the other; not as a 
 preacher or as what they call a " reform spotter." 
 I went among them on the terms of simple human 
 fellowship. I studied them in puritan Boston and 
 hypocritical Philadelphia, in Chicago, Minneapolis, 
 Baltimore, Washington, and Denver, as well as In 
 New York. I came to know them In London and 
 In Paris, In scores of our larger cities and smaller 
 towns. 
 
 Our method in New York is a fair example of my 
 general line of work. There we established a nomi- 
 nal residence, in which to see our former friends, 
 near the field of our labors, but we also rented rooms 
 In other sections, and it was mostly in these other 
 rooms, when not on the streets or In the dives, that, 
 among our new friends, we passed our time. 
 
 Many persons have asked us whether we em- 
 ployed any disguise. We did not. I had embarked 
 upon this work with a capital of less than seventy-five 
 dollars, and, as we did only enough magazine writ- 
 ing to keep us alive, we found that the clothes with 
 which we started were soon disguises sufficient for all 
 practical purposes. Twice, because of arrears In 
 rent, we were served with notices to quit. Several 
 times, after a night in the darkest corners of some 
 
6 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 city, we returned to go to bed with no guess as to how 
 we were to buy our breakfast. 
 
 I recollect one tenement in which we occupied a 
 place on the top floor. It was called a model tene- 
 ment, but a generous hole in the roof provided a 
 constant pool of water for our floor, with results that 
 proved nearly fatal. I protested. No repairs were 
 made. I stopped paying rent. The agent came to 
 the house and sent up word that he wanted to see 
 me. As it happened that I had been hurt in a little 
 affair the night before, I returned a message to the 
 effect that if he wanted to see me he could climb to 
 the seventh story. 
 
 The agent climbed and arrived panting and furi- 
 ous. He was a thin, sleek man in a comfortable 
 fur coat. When I explained my trouble, he laughed. 
 
 " Why," he said, " any roof is likely to leak. I 
 have a leak even in my own home right now." 
 
 " All right," I answered. " I'll trade you resi- 
 dences." 
 
 He did not accept my offer. 
 
 Whenever we went about our work, we found that 
 we quite soon came to know well the women whom 
 we were studying. We knew them as friends. In 
 one place, when we had, which was rarely, more 
 money than we thought we ought to carry about with 
 us into dives, we gave it for safe-keeping to a woman 
 that had served two terms as a pickpocket. In all 
 the cities where I studied, when there was more cash 
 than could be immediately used — which was less 
 often^I could always lend it to the girls, with the 
 absolute certainty of repayment. And, go where we 
 would, when we were in need of more money than 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 we had on hand — which was the most frequent situa- 
 tion of all — we could borrow small amounts from 
 these women. From positions of such intimacy I 
 studied the problem before me in all its phases — in 
 houses, flats, tenements, and in the darkened streets 
 and doorways; from the places patronized by club- 
 men to those patronized by sailors, peddlers, and 
 thugs — and although we found that conditions were 
 in some degree worse in such cities as New York 
 and Philadelphia than in certain other towns, that 
 difference, when It existed, was always one of degree 
 and never one of kind. 
 
 I remember well the first real prisoner — the first 
 real white slave — to whom I talked. She was a girl 
 from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and I asked her whether 
 the life was as bad as people said it was. I shall 
 never forget the look that came into her face as she 
 answered : 
 
 " I don't know what they say, but It's worse than 
 they can say, because there's a lot In It that there ain't 
 no words for." 
 
 f In every city I found that most of the girls had 
 been forced into prostitution — In what manner and 
 by what means I shall presently Indicate.y In several 
 I found the old brass-check system of payment still In 
 vogue. But In all, whether they are paid by cash or by 
 credit, I found that — as the victims have to pay their 
 masters and mistresses for clothes, food, and lodging, 
 and as the rates charged for these things are beyond 
 ^11 reason — the girls are uniformly kept hopelessly 
 in their owners' debt. 
 
 One little Chicago slave of the street — she was 
 scarcely sixteen years old — pointed out to me, what 
 
8 THE GIRL .THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 many another has since confirmed, the manner in 
 which her kind are robbed. 
 
 " Room rents," as she put it, *' is somethin' awful, 
 and the women that rents the rooms know we've got 
 to pay them whatever they've a mind to ask." 
 
 "And how about your clothes?" 
 
 " Well, we need showy ones, and the second-hand 
 stores where we get them — society ladies sells them 
 there — spot us the minute we come in, and up go the 
 prices accordin'." 
 
 "Where do you eat?" 
 
 " There's a slew o' restaurants that are really run 
 just for the girls in our business. Ours is hard work 
 and it needs hearty food, but those restaurants we've 
 got to go to (they won't serve us in lots of the 
 others) charge us Auditorium prices. Then there's 
 always medicine; there's miles to walk every night; 
 there's bad weather and hard times when there ain't a 
 cent to be earned, and yet all the while there's your 
 fellow waitin' round the corner, with his hand itchin' 
 to take all you got and his fist shut to crack you one 
 on the jaw if you don't give up." 
 
 Why don't they run away — these girls— from their 
 " fellows " ? I used to wonder about that, and they 
 all gave me the same answer. When I first put the 
 question it was to a Philadelphia victim. 
 
 She looked at me with eyes full of amazement. 
 . "Who? Me? Where'd I run to ?" she replied. 
 " If I ran to another man, it'd be the same thing over 
 again. If I started out for myself, my fellow'd find 
 me an' kill me — or, if he didn't quite finish the job, 
 he'd have me pinched. An' if I tried to get some 
 other sort of work before I'm too broken down to 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 do any other sort — well, I never learned a trade, an', 
 anyhow, who'd have me? " 
 
 You think of the reform schools — nearly all of 
 them semi-prisons — to which, in most of our States, 
 we send thousands of these offenders. What about 
 them? I asked that question of nearly all the pros- 
 titutes that I met, and once again I received a uni- 
 form reply. I give it here in the words of a Boston 
 street girl. 
 
 "Weren't you ever at a reform school?" I in- 
 quired. 
 
 "Yes," she answered; "an', honest to God, I 
 learned more of my business there than I ever learned 
 on the street." 
 
 From the women that I knew I learned in what 
 saloons the slave traders " hung out," and I hung 
 out there, too. At first I was avoided. But at last, 
 because I did not seem anxious to discover anything, 
 I discovered all that I wanted. The traders at last 
 talked before me freely, and I have heard them, in 
 one city and another, discuss their wares in much the 
 same tones and terms as those in which horse-dealers 
 talk of horseflesh. 
 
 It is only too easy to learn to be a white-slave 
 trader. The small boy, brought up with no advan- 
 tages, is necessary to his family as a wage-earner. 
 He is taken from school before the permitted age 
 and put to work in a factory on a false affidavit, falls 
 into some trifling trouble and loses his job. He gets 
 the chance to act as a " lighthouse " or scout for a 
 mature trader, who pays him well. Then he gets a 
 girl of his own and by physical punishment forces 
 her to go upon the street for him. Sometimes he be- 
 
lo THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 comes a waiter in a low saloon, and offers his personal 
 chattel to his drunken customers; but generally he is 
 unfitted by this time for any steady work. Occa- 
 sionally he owns three or four slaves and " farms 
 them out " to business acquaintances in other neigh- 
 borhoods or other cities, and often he sells a girl into 
 a house, either for a lump sum or for royalties on her 
 earnings. 
 
 Wherever there is hard luck looking for better 
 times, there you will find the trader looking for 
 slaves. Wherever there is poverty longing for com- 
 fort, discontent sighing for relief, hunger gasping for 
 food, there stands the trader with his easy air and 
 specious promises. He is at the factory door when it 
 opens to release the pallid workers for a breath of 
 night-air. He is at the cheap lunch-counter, where 
 the underpaid stenographers get their sandwiches 
 from underpaid waitresses. He is waiting around 
 the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk. Some- 
 times he offers marriage, always he offers economic 
 independence. The thing is done, and, once done, 
 blows and starvation perpetuate the slavery upon the 
 ignorant, and threats of arrest and the certainty of 
 public disgrace weld the shackles about the ankles 
 of the more knowing. 
 
 There, in the briefest possible terms, is the situa- 
 tion. The thing exists. It exists in your own city, 
 your own town. It threatens your own flesh and 
 blood. What are you going to do about it? 
 [^Suppression — efforts to close the houses of pros- 
 titution — is a failure; it is a treatment of the symp- 
 toms, but a neglect of the disease j Individual 
 reformation that deals with effects and forgets causes 
 
INTRODUCTION n 
 
 has never yet appreciably diminished the ranks of 
 public women. There remains, then, among the poli- 
 cies more prominently suggested, a general system of 
 sane education in sex-hygiene. 
 
 As every student of the social problem well re- 
 members, the bitterest cry of the girl that goes wrong 
 is, " Until it was too late, I didn't know ! " It is a 
 fact that nearly all our boys are left to discover the 
 fundamental truths of life from the worst of teachers 
 — their own ill-trained minds. It is a fact that nearly 
 all our girls are kept in ignorance of the full realities 
 until they learn them from their husbands, or until, 
 as is increasingly the case, they learn them, to their 
 ruin, from a man whose sole purpose is seduction. 
 Ignorance is not innocence. Genuine innocence im- 
 plies a complete, clean knowledge of the truth, and 
 all children may secure that knowledge in their own 
 schools or their own homes. 
 
 " Does anyone," asks the president-emeritus of 
 Harvard, " protest that such an educational process 
 will abolish innocence in young manhood and woman- 
 hood? Let him consider that the only alternative 
 for education in sex-hygiene is the prolongation of 
 the present awful wrongs and woes in the very vitals 
 of civilization." 
 
 Out of a prurient prudery that, only a few years 
 ago, forbade the very mention of prostitution and 
 its accompanying ills, we have thus advanced to a 
 position where educators declare that the silence of 
 the puritan has been the ally of the vicious. This 
 means much. Such a system of education as Dr. 
 Eliot suggests would mean more. It seems to me, 
 however, that there is still another step to be taken. 
 
12 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 What this step is and why it appears to me to be 
 necessary, I shall try to indicate In a book to be 
 pubhshed in the near future. 
 
 Reginald Wright Kauffman, 
 
 **The Gardens,*' 
 East Ayton, West; 
 
 Yorks, England; 
 20th August, 191 1. 
 
II 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WAS BAD 
 
 YOU must have met Gammage before. He is 
 the sort of man whose existence is passed be- 
 tween an effort not tO' miss the eight-six into 
 town and an effort to catch the five-eleven home. He 
 is one of those pale, nervous men who live in the 
 suburbs and have no sense of humor. He works in 
 a place that he vaguely describes as " the office " — 
 nobody knows precisely what sort of an office, and 
 nobody precisely cares. He works hard and he ac- 
 complishes just what is expected of him, and no more. 
 He talks a little about what he used to do when he 
 was younger and had a better job, and he talks a 
 great deal about his country club. He goes to church 
 twice on every Sunday, and on Saturday afternoons 
 he plays golf. Gammage is a highly respectable 
 man. 
 
 He is married, of course. All the Gammages are 
 married. And my Gammage's Mrs. Gammage is 
 what her husband describes as " a mighty fine 
 woman." She is little and timid and devoted, and 
 she is wholly sure that her husband is the best pos- 
 sible man alive. She was sure of it when they mar- 
 ried thirty years ago, and she is just as sure of it 
 to-day. 
 
 " Of course," she once confided to me, " I don't 
 know much about Edward's business affairs — I don't 
 
 13 
 
14 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 think a wife ought to interfere in such matters, do 
 you? — but I'm sometimes inchned to think that he 
 isn't wholly appreciated at The Office." 
 " Dear me," said I, " that's impossible! " 
 " Yes, it would seem so, and yet he is not ad- 
 vanced so rapidly as he ought to be. In fact, he isn't 
 advanced at all. And he works so hard, poor dear! " 
 The poor dear felt the same way about it, and I 
 happen to know that he had a good deal of trouble 
 in keeping his family up to that standard of living 
 required of members of his golf club. That is one 
 reason why, when I remembered his three children, 
 I was surprised to be told that there was to be a 
 fourth. 
 
 " Isn't it rather expensive? " I ventured. 
 " They are worth their weight in gold," said Gam- 
 mage. 
 
 "Certainly," I answered; "but, then, you can 
 never sell them at par." 
 
 Gammage was distressed at my ill-timed levity. 
 " It's this way," he explained. " It may sound 
 brutal, but it's the truth that if you have several chil- 
 dren you won't feel quite so terribly if you should 
 lose one." 
 
 I don't, here and now, undertake to censure that 
 philosophy of parenthood. There are a good many 
 phases to the question, not all of them germane to the 
 present subject; but I do beheve that, things being as 
 they are, the Gammages were not wel] enough off to 
 bring up so many children as they wanted in the way 
 in which they wanted to bring up their children, and 
 I do know that Gammage felt terribly indeed when 
 he lost Sarah, 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS BAD 15 
 
 She was the eldest child, and I have rarely seen 
 a prettier. Even as a dimpled baby, she won the 
 hearts of all of us, and as she grew older she com- 
 pletely enslaved her father and mother. She had 
 golden hair and eyes that were as black as eyes can 
 be, and her cheeks were pink and her smile the smile 
 of a young lady that knows her power. The Gam- 
 mages declared that there had never been a young- 
 ster like her, and, if we didn't quite agree to that, we 
 were none of us rude enough openly to dissent. 
 
 I remember that Sarah was the merest sort of a 
 tot when she learned her first " piece," and I sha'n't 
 soon forget how proudly good old Edward told me 
 about it. 
 
 " You've got to hear her say it," he declared, " If 
 you want properly to appreciate it. It's the first 
 three verses of that ' Excelsior ' thing, you know, and 
 I give you my word I never before realized how 
 much there was to the poem." 
 
 He used to try to give us an imitation of her 
 recitation. 
 
 I happened in at his house one evening a week 
 later. It was somewhere about ten o'clock. 
 
 " If you had only been an hour earlier," said Mrs. 
 Gammage, " we'd have had Sarah recite her piece for 
 you." 
 
 " You don't mean to say that you keep the child 
 up until nine ! " I ventured. 
 
 " Oh, no," Mrs. Gammage explained. " It isn't 
 that we keep her up; it's that she won't go to bed." 
 
 " Wouldn't you like to hear her? " asked Edward. 
 
 " Of course I should. I'll come earlier next 
 time." 
 
1 6 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 '* But I can get her now." 
 "What? Waken her?" 
 " She won't mind. She likes it." 
 He got her — got her in spite of my remonstrances. 
 It seemed to me that she minded a good deal; but 
 she was bribed with candy and placed upon the dining- 
 room table — we were having a late salad, I remember 
 — and there, after she had dug her round fists into 
 her beautiful eyes, she stood up and triumphantly 
 gave her recitation. When she had finished, we pre- 
 tended we were at a play and that she was the star. 
 Her parents applauded vociferously; Edward threw 
 her a faded carnation from his buttonhole, and Mrs. 
 Gammage kissed her and rewarded her with the prom- 
 ise that next night she could stay up as long as she 
 pleased. 
 
 Do you wonder that the child did it again? She 
 did — several times. They got to be rather hurt if 
 callers didn't ask for Sarah's " piece "; they formed 
 the habit of serving the child as a kind of extra 
 course, after the coffee, when there were guests to 
 dinner, and once, when Sarah replied to an encore 
 by kicking over Tommy Campbell's cup and soiling 
 the tablecloth, her father and mother became almost 
 hysterical over her budding cleverness. 
 
 It was that same summer that the Gammages 
 passed their two weeks' vacation at a small boarding- 
 house in the country — one of those places where all 
 the " guests " spend their time explaining to one 
 another that they " have come here only for the 
 quiet," for fear they will otherwise be' suspected 
 of coming for economic reasons. One day Sarah, the 
 landlady being ill, was found to have inundated the 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS BAD 17 
 
 kitchen garden with water, in an endeavor to " make 
 the flowers grow like Mrs. Bronson does," and, 
 though the flowers were ruined, the guests all thought 
 this remarkably funny and said so in Sarah's hearing. 
 
 The inevitable followed. There was a tank on 
 the roof, the only means of filling the single bath- 
 tub, and there was a spigot to tap the tank when there 
 happened to be an oversupply of water. Sarah, on 
 an unoccupied afternoon, climbed to the roof and, 
 turning the spigot, watched the entire supply run off 
 by way of the drain pipe. 
 
 Nobody thought that funny. Everybody com- 
 plained to Edward, and Edward, who had come in 
 hot from golfing on a poor links and who wanted a 
 bath, lost his temper and gave Sarah her first spank- 
 ing. 
 
 " You are a bad girl! " he declared. 
 
 " Then why," asked Sarah, " did you all laugh 
 when I watered the garden ? " 
 
 Edward was at a loss for reply. Besides, there 
 were reasons for believing that his domestic expenses 
 would be materially increased that winter, and his 
 employer had just written, in reply to a letter from 
 Edward, that he could not grant Gammage's request 
 for an advance of salary at the conclusion of the vaca- 
 tion. Gammage was in no mind for casuistry. 
 
 The boarding-house roof was not the only goal of 
 Sarah's climbing. In the yard of her suburban home 
 there were two trees, and for ascending these she early 
 developed a ready ability. When the Gammages 
 returned from the country and an occasion had arisen 
 to make her father threaten fresh punishment, Sarah 
 slipped from his hands, ran into the yard, and had 
 
1 8 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 reached a perch in the lower branches of one of the 
 trees before her father discovered her. Of course 
 he could reach her and lift her down, and of course 
 he did. But he had not really been very angry, and 
 the child's manner of escape struck him as so remark-- 
 ably funny that he laughed and forgave her for 
 whatever she had previously done. He told his 
 friends, and she heard him. 
 
 Upon that hint Sarah naturally acted. It was ob- 
 vious that, after an offense, if you could slip away 
 and climb a tree, you would be performing something 
 amusing enough to end all danger of punishment. 
 It worked on two or three occasions. Then Sarah 
 learned to climb higher, and at last Gammage, as- 
 cending in pursuit, fell, sprained an ankle, and 
 straightway flogged Sarah just as hard as if she had 
 not climbed at all. 
 
 The entire affair impressed the child as inexpli- 
 cable. She could make put no logical sequence be- 
 tween crime and punishment, and her parents never 
 helped her to a solution of the riddle. 
 
 Two facts were, however, clear in Sarah's young 
 mind: the most delightful thing in life was to attract 
 applause, and the one sure way to secure applause was 
 to be a little different from one's fellows, to go a 
 little farther than one's neighbors went. Upon these 
 facts she thenceforth ordered her conduct. She would 
 be scolded, she would be whipped, but she was soon 
 certain to hear her parents laughing about the offense 
 to their acquaintances. 
 
 " We must tell you what Sarah did yesterday," 
 she would hear them say. " Naturally, we had to 
 punish her, but it was really too funny for anything." 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS BAD 19 
 
 They sent her to dancing-school, where she at once 
 became the best and wildest of the dancers. They 
 thought that funny, too. Gammage had, you will 
 remember, no sense of humor. 
 
 " I suppose," he smiled at her upon her return 
 from her second lesson, " that you'll be having a 
 little sweetheart now." 
 
 "Why?" asked Sarah. 
 
 " Because," said her father, who liked to con- 
 sider himself epigrammatic, " most of the girls 
 wouldn't." 
 
 Sarah tossed her long locks. She had pretended 
 to scorn boys, but now she began to think differ- 
 ently. From the third lesson she returned radiant. 
 
 " I've got it! " she announced. 
 
 "Got what?" inquired her parents. 
 
 " One of those things you were talking about 
 last week — a sweetheart." 
 
 They enjoyed this. Remembering what Gammage 
 had said upon the subject, they thought that the 
 child's action was evidence of their Influence upon 
 her — which, in sober truth, it was. So Sarah's sweet- 
 heart came to be one of their staples of conversation 
 with Sarah. 
 
 When the first of her brothers had appeared, Sarah 
 was not a little put out. Theretofore she had focused 
 attention with small effort; now she had to try harder, 
 and as the number of junior Gammages Increased, the 
 hard lot of an elder child was made for this child 
 harder, because she had been taught first to expect 
 and then to demand so much. 
 
 Nor was that all. In the smaller Sarah certain 
 definite characteristics had been implanted, cultivated. 
 
20 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 admired; and now, as time went by, these same char- 
 acteristics appeared to be regarded as anything but 
 admirable in the larger Sarah. She could not see 
 why, but there was no denying the condition. There 
 came at last a period when she was punished nearly 
 every day for something of a sort that, in the old 
 days, had won her nothing but the applause she so 
 greatly craved. 
 
 Gammage did not explain it to her. He never 
 even supposed that an explanation was necessary. 
 Besides, his expenses grew and his income remained 
 as stationary as Gibraltar — and his nerves deterio- 
 rated accordingly. To be sure, there was Mrs. Gam- 
 mage; but, then, Mrs. Gammage was all day busy 
 with the other children. 
 
 " You're just a bad girl," said Gammage. 
 
 " Indeed you are," chorused Mrs. Gammage. 
 " And I don't know where in the world you ever got 
 it from, I'm sure." 
 
 At first this hurt her. Then she rebelled, denied, 
 fought. But in the end repetition did what repetition 
 always in the end will do : Sarah earned her ready- 
 made reputation. 
 
 She was fifteen then and at school. For some 
 time she had half the boys in the place at her heels, 
 for her beauty had grown with her years and her' 
 parents had begun by admiring her talents for heart- 
 breaking. Also, Mrs. Gammage being overoccupied 
 at home, Sarah had a good deal of time to herself. 
 
 Tommy Campbell was the first person to speak 
 to me about it. 
 
 " Have you noticed Gammage's oldest girl 
 lately? " he one day asked me. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS BAD 21 
 
 " Sarah? " said I. " Why, no; I don't know that 
 I have. What about her? " 
 
 " Boys." 
 
 " Well, she always was pretty and it's no wonder 
 that she should be popular." 
 
 " I know; but there are boys and boys. Besides, 
 I saw her coming out of a matinee in town last 
 Wednesday with a fellow I didn't like the looks of, 
 and from what I hear from my own youngsters she's 
 pretty frequently a truant from school." 
 
 " She does like admiration." 
 
 " She does that; she's been taught to. They used 
 to feed it to her with her milk bottle. The result was 
 that she didn't wear well. Most of the young boys 
 out home have got tired of her and now she's look- 
 ing elsewhere." 
 
 He heard a few more things a little later, and at 
 last he induced his wife to intimate some of them to 
 Mrs. Gammage. 
 
 But Mrs. Gammage only shook her head. 
 
 " Not our Sarah," said she. 
 
 Then the matter came irresistibly to Edward's at- 
 tention. Leaving his office at an unexpectedly early 
 hour, he almost collided with his daughter, who was 
 supposed to be at school, in loud and merry conversa- 
 tion with a cigarette-smoking youth of twenty on a 
 city street corner. 
 
 " What's this? " said Gammage. 
 
 " It's my friend, Mr. Walker," said Sarah, flush- 
 ing a bit, but trying to see things through. " I want 
 you to meet him, father." 
 
 Father scarcely glanced at the youth; he knew the 
 type. 
 
22 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 "Why aren't you at school?" he demanded of 
 Sarah. 
 
 " Because — I — I was excused to-day and I thought 
 I'd come in town and surprise you. I was just on my 
 way to your office." 
 
 " Well, you've surprised me, all right. Now come 
 along home. I'm going to give you a spanking." 
 
 He took her with him, angry and humiliated. He 
 kept his word about the spanking and he locked her 
 in her own room for twenty-four hours. 
 
 " You may come out when you have repented," he 
 told her. 
 
 " I won't repent," said Sarah. " I'm too old to be 
 whipped. You always used to laugh when I told 
 you the boys liked me." 
 
 "That was different; you were younger then." 
 
 The next morning Gammage came to her door. 
 
 " Are you sorry? " he demanded. 
 
 "No," said Sarah; "and, what's more, I'm not 
 going to be." 
 
 " I believe you are a thoroughly bad girl," said 
 Edward. 
 
 Of course, at last, Sarah decided that it was better 
 to say that she repented; but, equally of course, the 
 whole thing had, within a month, to be gone over 
 again. The only difference was that this time Mr. 
 Walker had been replaced by Mr. Foster. Then, 
 during the summer, Mr. Foster resigned in favor of 
 a Mr. Dalton, who said that his home was in another 
 city, three hundred miles away. Next January Ed- 
 ward was forced to force Dalton into a wedding, in 
 order, as Gammage put it, " to save the family name." 
 
 It was a sad little wedding, with the Gammages in 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS BAD 23 
 
 tears, Sarah looking unduly radiant, and Dalton look- 
 ing as if he wished it were a funeral. They left that 
 night for the young husband's own city, and for a 
 while things were quieter. Sarah wrote that she was 
 very happy, that Dalton had a good business position 
 — she never knew for certain what that position was — 
 and that she was really sorry to have been always 
 such a bad girl. 
 
 And after that she did not write again. 
 
 It was perfectly simple ; it happens every day, only 
 Gammage would not have known of it if Tommy 
 Campbell had not happened to run across Sarah in 
 the city to which her husband had taken her. It 
 wasn't Dalton's own city at all, and as soon as Sarah 
 had ceased to be interesting, Dalton deserted her. 
 She put the baby in a foundling asylum. She couldn't 
 go to work, because she did not know how to work, 
 and she couldn't go home, because she knew that she 
 would be regarded as a bad girl. She was a bad 
 girl, she concluded, and so she actually became what 
 is generally so described. Tommy trapped her into 
 betraying her real address, and then he telegraphed 
 to Edward. 
 
 Gammage forgave her and brought her home, 
 where she lives now with her little girl. She has man- 
 aged to learn dressmaking and to make a living by It, 
 but that trade Edward regards as rather a disgrace 
 to the family. She actually makes clothes for the 
 wives of some of his friends in the golf club, near 
 which she has rented a small cottage; and Gammage 
 still talks, about it in his weaker moments, to his 
 friends. 
 
 " I can't understand it," he says, " It is too ter- 
 
24 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 rlble — altogether too terrible ! We gave her so much 
 love — and then to think that she should go wrong! 
 Why, you must have known how we used to admire 
 her. Everybody noticed it. We didn't deny her any- 
 thing — not a thing. Of course she's all right now, 
 but her life is a ruin — a ruin — and it has made her 
 hopelessly hardhearted even to her mother and me. 
 We have offered again and again to take her little 
 girl into our own home and bring her up precisely 
 as we brought up Sarah, and— would you believe it? 
 — Sarah absolutely refuses to let us have anything to 
 do with the training of her daughter? " 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 
 
 THE New York man that built the apartment 
 house never told why he called It " The Chau- 
 cer." Certainly he had not chosen the name 
 because of any personal admiration for " the morn- 
 ing star of English song." He lived on Riverside 
 Drive, owned a string of bucket-shops across the con- 
 tinent, and found that the racing pages of the daily 
 paper satisfied his deepest cravings for imaginative 
 literature. He had never read a line of " The Parle- 
 ment of Briddes," would not have understood it had 
 it been read to him, and, if he had ever heard of the 
 Canterbury Pilgrims, probably confused that little 
 band with a musical-comedy company. Neverthe- 
 less, an apartment house has one human attribute — 
 to be respectable, it must have a name; and so, the 
 thing having been built and the hundreds of other 
 apartment houses in New York having pre-empted all 
 the titled names of Europe, the owner of this house 
 was doubtless forced to " drop into poetry." 
 
 Certainly there was nothing poetic about " The 
 Chaucer." A young newspaper reporter who lived 
 there used to remark that if architecture was indeed 
 frozen music, then " The Chaucer " was cold-storage 
 ragtime. It stood, far uptown, in the middle of a 
 block of other apartment houses so precisely like it 
 that, had it not been properly labeled. Its oldest tenant 
 
 25 
 
26 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 could not have told whether he lived at home or next 
 door. It resembled both the other side of the street 
 and the block beyond, and, when he looked at its 
 cluttered front of red brick, with white stone facings 
 that glared through the bars of interlacing fire-escapes, 
 the newspaper reporter described it as a handsome 
 pile, delicately combining the early day-coach school 
 with the late Pullman period. Though it presented 
 to the street a painted face, its rear wall was slat- 
 ternly; though its woodwork gleamed in the lamp- 
 light, the noon sun showed the cheap veneer. To 
 quote our newspaper reporter for the last time, its 
 name should have been The Porthos. 
 
 Even from the inanimate to the animate, like calls 
 to like ; make-believe people seek make-believe houses. 
 The inhabitants of " The Chaucer " partook of their 
 surroundings. They were bank-clerks newly married, 
 lads in brokers' offices who wanted the sham of 
 " bachelor apartments," maiden ladies that boasted 
 cousins in the society columns, and small businessmen 
 with ambitious wives. Everybody in " The Chaucer " 
 was more than respectable, for everybody was " cor- 
 rect"; everybody pretended to more means than he 
 had and floundered in debt to do it. The presiding 
 demon of the house was The Proper Thing. 
 
 It was The Proper Thing that ruined the Dow- 
 lings. 
 
 " I will not do it I " said Mrs. Dowling, on the one 
 occasion when her husband had suggested that they 
 go to the gallery of a theater. 
 
 " But, Ella," he had weakly protested, " we sim- 
 ply can't afford to pay the speculators' prices for 
 downstairs seats." 
 
THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 27 
 
 " Then," said Mrs. Dowling, " we can better af- 
 ford to stay at home. I won't sit in the gallery; it is 
 not the proper thing." 
 
 They paid the higher price and sat downstairs. 
 
 All that, however, was some years ago, and Dow- 
 ling, who had been a clerk "in a lawyer's office, was, 
 like the Pennsylvania German in the story, " dead 
 again." His last Illness had been a long one. The 
 entire house knew that it was severe, and not to have 
 had the highest-priced physicians and both a night 
 and day nurse would have been to confess the truth 
 of the family's finances; so Dowling died as he had 
 lived — beyond his means. But he had, by some 
 economic miracle, been able to stagger along with his 
 insurance premiums, and he left his wife a policy 
 worth — in spite of the loans made upon it — nearly 
 fifteen thousand dollars. 
 
 A policy worth nearly fifteen thousand dollars and 
 a daughter that straightway threatened to cost three 
 thousand dollars a year! 
 
 Letty Dowling — " Letty " had been her father's 
 name for her; both mother and daughter always used 
 the full name Letltia — Letty was not altogether to 
 blame. Mr. Dowling had told her that she must 
 go to the best finishing school, " just as soon as things 
 look up a little "; and from the day when Mrs. Dow- 
 ling had clothed the infant in a cambric dress, with a 
 silk bib and several yards of " real " lace, the mother 
 had sedulously cultivated in her offspring the desire 
 for all that was pretty, expensive, and worthless. 
 
 " Why not? " said Mrs. Dowling. " I guess that 
 anything that's good enough for a Fifth Avenue girl 
 isn't any too good for my daughter." 
 
28 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Thus Letty had grown to fifteen years. She had 
 grown in a home — If home it may be called — where 
 the parents deferred to her, where they preserved to 
 her and even to each other the mask of prosperity 
 that, from long usage before their neighbors, had be- 
 come a habit of life; where the child was the focus 
 of an admiration that would have regarded as almost 
 sacrilegious any suggestion of social supervision for 
 its object. She was as pampered as an old maid's 
 pug dog and as uncared for as a wolf-cub. 
 
 In order not to spoil herself for the finishing 
 school, to which she was never sent, she left the public 
 school the year before her father's death. In order 
 to keep herself occupied in the meantime, she walked 
 up and down Broadway with two or three girls that 
 were just such products as she was of just such con- 
 ditions as were hers. She lived in an atmosphere of 
 matinees, candy, and taxicabs; knew the story of 
 every romantic play and the marital history of every 
 popular actress, and kept on her bureau the photo- 
 graphs of a half-dozen actors, which she had sent to 
 the originals for autographing. Erect, lithe, golden- 
 haired, and blue-eyed, she was pretty; overdressed 
 and overcoiffured and wearing the false air of worldly 
 wisdom that she had picked up along Broadway, she 
 looked three years older than she really happened 
 to be. She had always thought that her parents were 
 well-to-do, because they gave her all she asked. There 
 was not one atom of positive harm In the girl and not 
 one atom of active usefulness. It was a case of beau- 
 tiful stagnation, of waste. 
 
 When Dowling died, his widow thought of invest- 
 ing the fifteen thousand. But there were some imme- 
 
THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 29 
 
 diate expenses to be met, and when these were cleared 
 away others took their place. Mrs. Dowling decided 
 to wait until she and her daughter were once more, 
 as she expressed it, " on their feet." By the time 
 they had assumed that erect posture, the fifteen thou- 
 sand had shrunk to ten and — Mrs. Dowling was still 
 young — a prosperous real-estate agent was attentive 
 to the mother. It seemed quite unnecessary to deny 
 herself a few luxuries; she did not invest the money. 
 
 After that, things moved rapidly. Mother and 
 daughter lived at the rate of five thousand a year. 
 The real-estate agent retreated, but a commercial 
 traveler appeared to be on the point of proposal. 
 Another five thousand disappeared. Then the com- 
 mercial traveler went into that mysterious country 
 that he called his " territory " and never returned, 
 and the widow began definitely to seek a husband. 
 As Letty's sixteenth birthday approached, Mrs. Dow- 
 ling found herself confronting a bank balance of 
 three thousand dollars, with no prospect of increase. 
 
 It was on a night at this period that Letty and her 
 newest friend, Jane Hervy, whose family lived just 
 across the street, came from a theater and, with the 
 rest of the audience, turned into brightly lighted 
 Broadway. 
 
 " I don't feel like going right home," said Jane. 
 " I don't feel like it a bit." 
 
 She, too, was overdressed and overcoiffured; but, 
 unlike Letty's, her face was pale and nervous. 
 
 " I don't feel like it, either," Letty confessed; 
 " but where can we go? " 
 
 " Let's " — Jane's eyes sparkled — " let's slide into 
 a cafe and have some Rhine wine and a rarebit." 
 
30 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 The suggestion was golden with the lure of novelty. 
 
 " I'd love to," faltered Letty; " only " 
 
 "Only what?" 
 
 " Only I'm broke, dear." 
 
 Jane's face was all surprise. "No money?" 
 The idea was new to her. 
 
 Letty nodded woefully. Not so long ago the idea 
 had been new to her, too; but within the last few 
 weeks her mother had begun to be surprisingly 
 " close," and Letty, ashamed to acknowledge this and 
 unwilling to forego her pleasure, had that afternoon 
 pawned her seal-ring for the price of the theater 
 ticket. 
 
 " Not a cent left," said Letty. 
 
 " I think," retorted her companion, with mature 
 feminine divination, " that your mother's real mean." 
 
 "She's not! " flashed Letty. 
 
 " Well, I think so, anyhow. Look at your furs I 
 You said yourself they were worn out. But never 
 mind; this will be my treat." 
 
 Letty did mind: most of the treats had lately been 
 Jane's. However, though she had often been in 
 Broadway cafes for afternoon tea, she had never been 
 in one for evening Liebfraumilch. With a sense that 
 something wonderful was about to happen, she suc- 
 cumbed. 
 
 Nothing did happen. Nothing ever does — at first. 
 What she ate and drank was pleasant only because 
 it was unusual, and what she saw only annoyed her 
 because, whereas her street clothes had not seemed 
 amiss at the same table on many an afternoon, she 
 was now shamefully conscious of their inadequacy 
 among the scores of brilliant toilets about her. She 
 
THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 31 
 
 laughed and chatted with Jane, but her eyes were on 
 the women, and she wished she was at home. 
 
 At the next table sat two men and a woman. The 
 one man's face was hidden, but his companion — who 
 might have been forty years old and was large and 
 stout, with a heavy dark mustache and a red face — 
 looked at Letty with a gaze that she had often en- 
 countered, but never understood. She did not under- 
 stand it now, though she was pleased that she should 
 have attracted the attention of a man of such maturity 
 in the company of a woman so richly clad. She 
 looked at the woman, whose back was turned, but 
 whose shoulders were covered by a broad boa of 
 ermine. Letty did not know whether to be flattered 
 by the man's glance or envious of the woman's 
 furs. 
 
 When the girls rose, Letty hooked her common- 
 place mink fur about her throat, and, in passing, 
 surreptitiously touched, with longing fingers, the 
 ermine boa. She thought afterward that the red- 
 faced man must have observed the gesture. At any 
 rate, as they reached the door, a hurrying waiter 
 overtook her and Jane and placed in Letty's hand a 
 card. Almost instinctively Letty's fingers closed 
 about the piece of pasteboard. 
 
 " It's just one of my cards that I dropped," she 
 explained to Jane. 
 
 But, once she was alone in her own room at " The 
 Chaucer," she looked at the card, found that it must 
 have come from the red-faced man, that it bore a 
 name wholly unfamiliar, and that it asked an appoint- 
 ment with " the prettiest girl in the room." 
 
 Well — Letty kept the appointment. She was 
 
32 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 pleased by the tribute to her looks, but angry that a 
 stranger should have approached her; she was afraid 
 of she knew not what, but her head was turned by 
 something that she could not describe; she was sure 
 that the adventure was one not to be narrated, but she 
 was hungry to be a part of the gorgeous company 
 that she had seen in the cafe — so she kept the appoint- 
 ment. 
 
 Again nothing happened. There was simply a 
 decorous luncheon — no more. And a few evenings 
 later there was an equally decorous supper. 
 
 " I should think you'd be ashamed of me," said 
 Letty, on this occasion, to the red-faced man. 
 
 " Ashamed? " He raised his thick eyebrows. 
 
 " My clothes; they're good enough," she explained, 
 " but beside all the clothes in this place they're posi- 
 tively shabby." 
 
 He dissented; but he so dissented that she knew 
 that, in his heart, he agreed with her. Very soon she 
 found herself telling him of her troubles and con- 
 fessing to the attraction, not so long since, of that 
 ermine boa. He rather shocked her by ofFering to 
 buy her such an ornament. A few days later he even 
 showed her a beautiful fur in a Fifth Avenue shop- 
 window; but Letty held aloof, and the red-faced 
 man did not press her — he merely gave her to under- 
 stand that the boa would be hers for the asking. He 
 was still all that Letty thought he should be; but she 
 often passed the shop alone and lingered by the 
 window. 
 
 One day, at noon — her usual rising hour — Letty 
 stalked, kimono-clad, into the dining-room for her 
 breakfast. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 33 
 
 " I think," said Letty, " that I have made up my 
 mind what I want for a birthday present." 
 
 The choice of a birthday present for herself was 
 one of Letty's annual annoyances. A dozen things, 
 each more expensive than the last, were always de- 
 cided upon and then discarded. 
 
 Mrs. Dowling, from behind the coffee urn, looked 
 up almost apprehensively, a tremulous smile on her 
 weak, round face. 
 
 "What is it?" she asked. 
 
 " Well," said Letty, in the midst of an unstifled 
 yawn, " I want a set of ermine — hat, boa, and muff." 
 
 The mother bit her lip. 
 
 " We can't — I'm afraid I can't give you all that," 
 she quavered. 
 
 Instantly Letty's blue eyes flashed. 
 
 "Why not? All the other girls have them. It's 
 midwinter and my mink neckpiece is a fright, and the 
 muff is molting." 
 
 " I — I just don't think I can afford It, dear." 
 
 "Not afford it? Why not?" 
 
 " There are so many expenses and " 
 
 "And I'm one of them? Mother! " Letty had 
 been to the theater the night before, and after the 
 theater had stopped, with the red-faced man — of 
 whose existence her mother was, of course, ignorant 
 — at a cafe, where they had eaten a supper that had 
 not wholly agreed with Letty. Once more nothing 
 had happened, but Letty's temper was none of the 
 best. " Didn't you just buy yourself a new hat? " she 
 demanded. " And weren't you just talking about buy- 
 ing a silver cigar-case for that horrid Mr. Theis " — 
 Mr. Theis was the matrimonial fish for whom Mrs. 
 
34 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Dowling was then angling — " a silver cigar-case for 
 his Christmas present?" 
 
 The mother bowed her head. She did not know 
 how to explain. 
 
 " Exactly," said the daughter. " And yet now 
 you sit up there, when I'm ever so much worse dressed 
 than the other girls, when I'm freezing to death — 
 freezing to death! — and you won't buy me a set of 
 miserable furs, and you call me extravagant and you 
 say I'm ruining you ! " 
 
 " Letitia," wailed Mrs. Dowling, " I never said 
 anything of the sort ! " 
 
 " You thought it, anyhow. Yes, you did! I saw 
 it in your eyes. I don't want any breakfast. I don't 
 care if it does make me sick to go without it. You 
 needn't coax. I can't bear to be spoken to so meanly." 
 
 She whirled out of the room. 
 
 Such scenes had, of late, been of growing fre- 
 quency, for, contrary to all previous customs, Mrs. 
 Dowling had, within that autumn, thrice refused her 
 daughter's requests either for money or its equivalent. 
 But heretofore the end of the squabble had been dif- 
 ferent. The child had been followed to her own 
 room, petted, cajoled, wept over, and finally given 
 what she had wanted. Now Mrs. Dowling knew, at 
 last, that she must call a halt. She wept, but she did 
 not follow. 
 
 Letty, in her bedroom — among a collection of 
 school pillows and college flags — flung herself down 
 on the couch by the window. She, too, cried; but the 
 mother's tears were those of impotent sorrow, the 
 daughter's those of balked desire. At first Letty 
 cried softly, for she thought that Mrs. Dowling 
 
THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 35 
 
 would come to her relief. Then, as Mrs. Dowhng 
 did not come, the girl cried louder, as a summons. 
 And when the summons was unanswered, Letty's 
 grief became a howl of genuine self-pity. 
 
 In the midst of it, however, she came to a sudden 
 pause. She had raised her face to the window open- 
 ing on a miscalled light shaft, and there, only a floor 
 below, in the wing opposite, she saw a young woman 
 at her toilet. 
 
 The woman was not very pretty and not personally 
 attractive, but it was at once evident that she was 
 engaged in making herself so. Letty watched her, 
 fascinated. 
 
 The woman, clad in lace negligee, sat before a 
 mirror and had at hand a smaller glass that she fre- 
 quently brought into use to examine the back of her 
 head and neck. Her dressing-table was covered with 
 silver-backed brushes and combs, manicuring imple- 
 ments, and numerous bottles, boxes, and jars. She 
 remained there, and Letty remained watching, for 
 two hours. 
 
 The woman dipped her fingers into one of the 
 boxes and rubbed them on her face; then she went 
 over her face with a soft rag. By the light of a 
 gas-jet flaming at her elbow, she peered hard into the 
 large mirror, while for forty-five minutes she clipped, 
 with a strangely curved pair of scissors, at her eye- 
 brows, finally delicately penciling what remained of 
 them. On a thin stick she deftly rolled back one 
 eyelid after the other, skillfully plying the pencil the 
 while. Sh€ rouged the right cheek and the left, 
 scrutinizing each in the hand-glass, and touching, rub- 
 bing, and retouching until their glow was equal and 
 
36 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 properly distributed. She rouged her lips; she ap- 
 plied a powder puff. She fitted upon the top of her 
 head a great mass of false curls, patted it, pulled at it, 
 adjusted it and readjusted. And she placed on the 
 curls, with such a gesture as that wherewith a queen 
 must don her crown, a beautiful ermine toque. 
 
 Letty forgot her tears. She watched the woman 
 until the toilet was completed, and then she went 
 downstairs. The woman was just stepping into a 
 well-appointed automobile. 
 
 Letty turned to the negro that was at once day- 
 clerk, telephone operator, and hallboy for " The 
 Chaucer." 
 
 " Who's that? " she inquired. 
 
 The boy showed his white teeth in a broad grin. 
 
 " Miss Millicent," he answered. 
 
 "Millicent what?" 
 
 " I think her las' name's Duval. Somethin' 
 French, anyhow. But all the young men that come 
 to see her jes calls her ' Miss Millicent.' " 
 
 "Is that her auto?" 
 
 " I dunno. She has it every day." 
 
 " Does she live all alone? " 
 
 " Yessem." 
 
 Free! The woman was free and rich and happy. 
 Letty went out for a walk and lingered long before 
 the ermine boa in the Fifth Avenue shop window. 
 
 For all the week that followed she said nothing 
 more about birthday presents to her mother, and her 
 mother was too well pleased by this silence to risk 
 disturbing it. Letty passed her time spying upon 
 Miss Millicent. She watched the woman's toilet, her 
 comings and goings. She saw the gas burning deep 
 
THE GIRL THAT WANTED ERMINE 37 
 
 into the night in Miss Millicent's apartments, and she 
 saw the handsome young men that entered there. 
 She heard their laughter and the late music of a 
 piano. 
 
 Then there came a night when, after the theater, 
 the red-faced man induced Letty to drink a little 
 champagne, and when she told him about Miss Milli- 
 cent. 
 
 At one o'clock Mrs. Dowling received a telephone 
 message from her daughter, who said that she would 
 sleep at Jane's. 
 
 The next afternoon Letty returned home. In the 
 hall she stopped to hide, under her long coat, an 
 ermine boa. Five months later she disappeared. 
 
 Her mother never saw her again. 
 
 But I did. 
 
IV 
 
 THE GIRL THAT STUDIED ART 
 
 I DID not intend to tell this story. It was not 
 included in the original plan of the present 
 series, because I wanted the present series to be 
 solely typical and because I believed that the case in 
 point was exceptional. 
 
 Now, however, I know better. 
 
 I returned to Paris a few weeks ago, after an ab- 
 sence of some years. On our second evening in the city, 
 my wife and I were sitting in front of the Cafe Pan- 
 theon, just where the Boul' Miche' meets the Luxem- 
 bourg Gardens and just where the greater arteries 
 of the Quartier Latin pump back and forth the life 
 blood of the student section. 
 
 It was a spring evening — such an evening of spring 
 as one finds rarely anywhere save in Paris — and 
 grave-faced young men of all nationalities, in the 
 absurd costumes of no nationality at all, were sitting 
 about us and strolling by — young men with women 
 that were both young and old, slim figures uphol- 
 stered to an impossible rotundity, plump figures 
 squeezed to an agonizing slimness, pink cheeks pow- 
 dered to simulate death, and cheeks like the dead's 
 painted to mimic health. 
 
 " There," said I, " is an American girl. I know 
 she is American, because she looks so studiously 
 French." 
 
 38 
 
THE GIRL THAT STUDIED ART 39 
 
 " And there," said my wife, " is another." 
 
 They fluttered by like the rest — like all the moths 
 that circle the flame — some with one man, some with 
 two, and some alone. Many stopped and looked 
 over the seated crowd, waiting invitations. We 
 caught one's crayoned eye, and she sat down. 
 
 " Hello, America ! " said she. " Do buy me a 
 beer!" 
 
 Unusual? So we thought — then. But on the next 
 evening we met more American girls like her. And 
 on the next. 
 
 I got their stories. Rather, I got their story. 
 We verified the details — the two of us. And then 
 I recalled again the story that I had not meant to in- 
 clude in this series and decided to include it, because, 
 after all, it was just this story that I had now heard 
 told again ! It is typical — I do not say of all young 
 girls sent abroad, unfriended, to study music or art, 
 but I do say of a great number. 
 
 What I remembered was not a boulevard in Paris; 
 it was a certain street in Denver. Perhaps you know 
 the street I mean. It is a street of one-story houses 
 with two rooms — the back room that is a bedroom, 
 and the front room that is a show window. There are 
 little doors opening into the front rooms; on each 
 door is a brass plate bearing a Christian name only. 
 In the show-window, which is always open, sits the 
 woman that uses the name on the door-plate. 
 
 Not so many years ago I was walking down that 
 street. The hour was early — for this portion of the 
 city — and the street had few pedestrians. I was think- 
 ing of other things and I was singing, half aloud, a 
 French nursery rhyme. 
 
40 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Au clair de la lune, 
 
 Mon ami Pierrot, 
 Prete-moi ta plume 
 
 Pour ecrire un mot. 
 
 I got SO far and then I stopped. Another voice — 
 it must once have been a woman's voice — had taken 
 up the simple melody: 
 
 Ma chandelle est morte, 
 Je n'ai plus de feu. 
 
 I turned. The singer was seated in the open win- 
 dow at my elbow. 
 
 There is no need to describe her. It is enough to 
 say — it is surely enough — that she belonged in that 
 frame. 
 
 " Where did you learn the song? " I asked. 
 
 Her lips, stiff with paint, tried to curve into the 
 trade smile. 
 
 " I was born French," she said. 
 
 I shook my head. " The name on your door is an 
 English one." 
 
 She shrugged. 
 
 " As if the name mattered," said she. 
 
 " At all events," I insisted, " the accent does. 
 Yours was abominable." 
 
 At that she flashed. Now, one is not tender of a 
 natural gift, but we are all jealous of our acquirements. 
 I pressed my point and she confessed that I had 
 guessed rightly. In the end she told me all that there 
 was to tell. 
 
 " I always wanted to be an artist," she said. 
 " When I was a mere bit of a girl I wanted it. I 
 
THE GIRL THAT STUDIED ART 41 
 
 tried to draw pictures long before I could write the 
 alphabet, and I grew up to believe that there wasn't 
 anything else much worth while. 
 
 " We lived in Baltimore— my father and mother 
 and my two brothers. We weren't really Southern- 
 ers — my parents were born down East — but we were 
 poor; and later, because I didn't like to be poor 
 without any good reason for it, I used to tell peo- 
 ple that my family had been ruined through its 
 loyalty to the Confederacy. As a matter of fact, 
 father was a foreman in one of the mills and my 
 brothers both worked on the railroad. 
 
 " Well, as I say, I always wanted to be an artist. 
 I know now that I hadn't much talent. I might have 
 managed to do a few illustrations, some day, for the 
 fashion-page of a newspaper; but as for making any- 
 think like a real living at art, that would never have 
 happened. I was just a sort of possible second-class 
 so-so — which is what most girls are who try to 
 break into the game. But I thought I was a genius. 
 I so hard wanted to be a genius that I thought I 
 was. 
 
 " It's no joke wanting terribly to be something 
 that it's just not in you ever to become. Deep down 
 in your heart, where you never know it, you mistrust 
 yourself, and that makes you hate everybody else. It 
 makes you bitter. 
 
 " The worst of it was that my own family encour- 
 aged me. They were so kind that if I'd said I was 
 an angel, they'd have seen the wings, and they loved 
 me so mucli that they'd have sold the carpets to buy 
 me an aureole — especially mother. I just went among 
 them living on their praises, and by and by I never 
 
42 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 seemed to put my foot on the ground — simply lived 
 in the clouds from sunrise to sunrise. 
 
 " Well, of course I couldn't spare the time to learn 
 to cook or sew, and of course I couldn't waste my 
 inspiration over the regular studies in the public 
 school. I didn't see what use an artist would have 
 for a needle or a frying-pan or a history of the world. 
 What I wanted was an instructor in art with a large 
 A; so naturally poor father drew some of his build- 
 ing-association cash, and mother, she got up the stock- 
 ing from the mattress, where she kept what she could 
 save from the market money, and they sent me to a 
 man that said he knew all the art there ever was. 
 
 " He didn't. He was only one of a tremendous 
 army of fakers that are making a living out of the 
 brand of fool that I happened to be. Even I found 
 that out at last, and then I changed him for another 
 that was just as much of a sell. 
 
 " Don't get it into your head that I was bad or 
 even fast. I was only a simpleton, like lots and lots 
 of girls that go abroad to study art every year. I 
 read no end of books about artist life, but they were 
 the sort of books that cover things over and turn your 
 head instead of showing things up and keeping you 
 sane. I knew about as much about the real facts of 
 life as I knew about the real facts of art. 
 
 " Those books helped a lot. They were all Paris 
 — a Paris that never was and never could be. You 
 know what I mean — studios and music and dancing, 
 chafing-dish suppers to-night and the Prix de Rome 
 to-morrow. You have a good time and the govern- 
 ment buys your masterpiece for the Luxembourg, 
 and you marry the poor painter that loved you and 
 
THE GIRL THAT STUDIED ART 43 
 
 that turns out to be a Los Angeles millionaire in 
 disguise. 
 
 " After about a year of that I decided it was 
 Paris or nothing. I'd never wanted to begin draw- 
 ing anywhere short of the life class, and now 
 
 Well, no Peabody Institute for me. 
 
 " So I went to Paris. Yes, I did. I figured it 
 all out — from the books, of course — and I proved to 
 the satisfaction of the family that I could live in 
 the Latin Quarter on thirty-five francs — on seven 
 dollars — a week, and live well. 
 
 " ' Are you sure about this ? ' asks father. 
 Sure,' say I. ' Nearly everyone does.' 
 
 " Don't ask me how they got the money together. 
 I hate to think about it. It makes me sick. But 
 they got it- — enough to send me over on a second- 
 class boat that I thought was a palace till we had our 
 first rough day, and enough to keep me — at seven 
 dollars a week — for the first month. They'd starve 
 and they'd pinch and they'd borrow, and they'd send 
 me the rest weekly. 
 
 " I won't tell you about the chill I got when I 
 got off the Antwerp train at Gare du Nord, and I 
 won't tell you how I felt when I found that the 
 French I'd worked up was no more French than it 
 was English — and not so much. What'd be the 
 use of telling you? They all go through it, those 
 art girls — nearly everyone. 
 
 " Somebody'd given me the name of a pension on 
 the Rue St. Jacques, and I went there, and about the 
 time I owed my first bill I remembered that I hadn't 
 counted on my washing — that I hadn't counted much 
 of anything in that thirty-five francs a week. Nearly 
 
44 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 everyone makes that little mistake — they all told me 
 so. You can't be happy In Paris without enough to 
 live on any more than you can be happy while you're 
 starving anywhere else. 
 
 " I don't mean that I really starved. I only mean 
 that I had to miss some meals and had to skimp the 
 others. I mean I was underfed and badly clothed 
 and rather badly housed. I couldn't ask for more 
 money; they were working their fingers to^ the bone, 
 back in Baltimore, to give me what they did give, 
 and I couldn't have had it in my heart to ask for 
 more, even if they had more to send me. I was just 
 homesick and lonely and poor. 
 
 " Well, there's no use giving you details. I guess 
 you can see how it was. There was a little Italian 
 boy, a student, in our pension, and he used to take 
 me out for a stroll up the Boul' Miche' of an evening, 
 and sometimes, when he felt flush, we'd stop at the 
 Cafe Pantheon for a glass of coffee. I was just ready 
 to fall into anybody's arms when he told me he loved 
 me — that's the way with nearly all the girls over 
 there; but I knew he was about as hard up as I was, 
 and so I asked him how in the world he ever ex- 
 pected to be able to support a wife. 
 
 " You ought to have seen his face ! He was a 
 pretty boy, with curly black hair and the big black 
 eyes of a baby, and there never was such an innocent 
 child as he was when he answered. 
 
 Why,' he told me, ' I mean we can do better 
 together, keeping house In a little studio of our own, 
 each paying a share, than we can do this way at the 
 pension. Marriage? Why should we marry? We 
 love each other! ' 
 
THE GIRL THAT STUDIED ART 45 
 
 " I got mad, of course, and I asked him if he 
 really meant me to do such a thing as he proposed. 
 
 " ' Surely,' says he, with that innocent look of 
 his. ' Up here nearly everyone does.' 
 
 "Well, I wouldn't speak to him for a week; but 
 at the end of that time, the idea being in my head, I 
 began to look around, and I found that what he told 
 me was the truth. Most of the girls and boys were 
 perfectly frank about it — to each other — though 
 you're never supposed to say anything about it to an 
 outsider. Lots and lots of them keep house that way 
 together, because they say it's cheaper and more com- 
 panionable, and most of them separate at last, per- 
 fectly good friends, and never meet again. The fel- 
 low goes away and marries and never tells his wife, 
 and the girl goes away and marries and lies to her 
 husband. 
 
 " So in the end I did what nearly everyone else 
 did. I gave in. 
 
 " We had a little room at the top of a house in a 
 crooked street just off the Rue de la Sorbonne. We 
 tried to learn to cook and we tried harder not to be 
 lonely. There were enough couples like us to give 
 us plenty of company, and I really did begin to get 
 along some with my work. 
 
 " We never had but one quarrel that was any- 
 ways serious. Victor — that was his name, only I 
 always called him Beppo — got up before me one 
 morning to cook the breakfast, because I wasn't well. 
 But it was cold and he was cross, and when he 
 brought the coffee and rolls over and I spilled the 
 coffee, he slapped the tray out of my hand and then 
 smacked my mouth. I burst out crying, and then— 
 
46 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 we hadn't heard any knocking, because of the noise 
 we made — the door opened, and there was Mother. 
 
 " My mother I 
 
 " An uncle of hers had died. I remember his 
 name was Ezra and he Hved in Lowell, Mass. Well, 
 he'd died and left her five hundred dollars, and she'd 
 come over to Paris as a surprise for me. . . . 
 
 " We got home somehow. I couldn't tell you 
 how, if my life depended on it. I know we came by 
 the next boat. I tried to explain to her that all I'd 
 done was just what nearly everyone does, but you 
 can't explain some things to your mother. She said 
 she wouldn't tell father or the boys, but she said her 
 heart was broken; and I guess it was, for after 
 father was killed next year in the mill, she just kind 
 of withered up and died. 
 
 " You might think that would be the end of me, 
 but it wasn't. I saw how bad I'd been, but I saw 
 there was no good to be gained by only crying, so I 
 kept my crying for the nighttime; and when Jim 
 married and went to 'Frisco, and Charlie married 
 and went to New Orleans — Jim and Charlie were 
 my brothers — I traveled with Jim as far as St. Louis 
 and tried to get a place as a housekeeper. 
 
 " You see, I'd worked hard since I got back from 
 Paris. Mother had taught me a good bit about 
 housework there toward the last, and I was still 
 rather young and pretty and I had got a little polish 
 from my trip abroad. 
 
 " I found a place. It was in the house of a well- 
 to-do man that had just lost his wife. He had a 
 little daughter and didn't want his home broken up. 
 When I learned he'd lived abroad some, I just didn't 
 
THE GIRL THAT STUDIED ART 47 
 
 say that I had, too, and by and by he got to liking 
 me, and at last we were married. 
 
 " We started West on our wedding trip. He 
 asked me questions. I did what nearly everyone 
 else does that has done what nearly everyone else 
 does over in the Quarter — I lied. 
 
 " But somehow I didn't lie very well. Somehow 
 I let it out that I'd been an American student in 
 Paris. I guess I'll never forget the look that came 
 into his face then. 
 
 " ' I know what that is,' he told me ; ' for, you 
 see, I was once a student in Paris myself.' 
 
 " He put his hand in his pocket and handed me 
 all the money he had about him. 
 
 "'What's this mean?' I asked. 
 
 " ' It means that you can go as far as this train 
 will take you,' he said; ' but I'm going to get off at 
 the next stop.' 
 
 " He did, too. 
 
 " I went on to St. Jo. I got here a year later. 
 I've been here ever since." 
 
 The woman stopped her story. I looked at her 
 again, and I saw that her life had nearly completed 
 its work upon her. 
 
 " What was that reason you gave for giving in to 
 Beppo? " I asked her. 
 
 " The reason was that I was just doing what 
 nearly everyone else does over there," said she. 
 
 " And why did you lie to your husband ? " I in- 
 quired. 
 
 " I — I don't know. Well, I suppose I was just 
 finishing in America what I'd begun in Paris." 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 
 
 THERE were three of us sitting that night in 
 the office of a Lieutenant of Police in Detroit. 
 There was our host, the Lieutenant; there 
 was my friend Thorley, and there was L It was a 
 Saturday evening, but the hour was still too early for 
 the week-end rush of arrests to begin, and so we 
 had been smoking long cigars and telling long stories. 
 Apropos of one of these, the Lieutenant made a not 
 altogether original remark. 
 
 " Love," said the Lieutenant, " is blind." 
 
 I nodded — after all, I was a guest. 
 
 But Thorley was not a guest; his was one of those 
 wonderful souls which are invited everywhere, but 
 are everywhere at home. 
 
 " Love," said Thorley, " is not bhnd by nature, it 
 is not blind at birth; the wrong lies in the fact that 
 most lovers, being too weak to resist modern condi- 
 tions, commit the infamous crime of blinding it. We 
 accept old aphorisms, inherited traditions, worn-out 
 conventions. We ask no questions — there is the 
 fundamental error — we ask no questions. Well, we 
 have been told that Love must be blind; and so, when 
 we find our love seeing little human needs and lacks in 
 the loved object, instead of trying to supply those 
 needs or remedy the lacks — Instead of being true — ^we 
 deliberately heat our irons of lies in the furnace of 
 
 48 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 49 
 
 convention, and with them we burn out the eyes of 
 Love." 
 
 " I guess you're right," nodded the Lieutenant, 
 with the air of a man that hasn't the least idea what 
 his friend is talking about. " Have another cigar." 
 
 " Thank you," said Thorley. He chose the cigar 
 carelessly, bit the end and struck a match. 
 
 I was sorry for the bewildered Lieutenant. I 
 wanted to rescue him, to divert the conversation ; but 
 I could think of nothing more diverting than the 
 weather. 
 
 " It's a warm night," said L 
 
 " Pretty warm," replied the Lieutenant, " but not 
 so bad as it is sometimes. I recollect the summer of 
 1898 — or was it 1899? I know it was a couple of 
 years before I was " 
 
 "Blind!" interrupted Thorley. 
 
 He spoke from the midst of his blue smoke 
 wreaths, like an Hellenic oracle. It was as if the 
 smoke had shut from him the trivial sounds of our 
 digression. 
 
 ''Blind!" repeated Thorley. "Yes, we blind 
 Love. And the worst of it is that we do not know 
 we do it — still less how much we do it. We say that 
 Love is blind — and what do we mean? We mean 
 that the man and woman attracted to each other can't 
 see each other's faults. I tell you that there is no 
 love so blinded — I refuse the form ' blind ' — I tell ( 
 you that there is no love so blinded as the love of 
 parent for child." 
 
 The Lieutenant looked at me and grinned. He 
 grinned openly, as if to say, "The man's started; 
 he's off; there's no use trying to stop him. We'd a 
 
50 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 sight better just sit still and let him run down." 
 There was no offense in the grin; the Lieutenant 
 knew, and I knew, that, for all the effect that they 
 would have on Thorley, the words might as well have 
 been shouted — and Thorley pursued : 
 
 " I used to live in a town of about fifteen thousand 
 inhabitants, some seventy-odd miles from St. Paul. 
 It was a pretty little town. It was as clean as Sun- 
 day, it was as well regulated as Swiss watches used 
 to be, and it was as carefully laid out as if it had 
 been ready for its funeral. Mohawk — I shall call the 
 town Mohawk, for the excellent reason that that was 
 not its name — Mohawk was proud of these things. 
 It was, moreover, so proud of the fact of its once 
 having been able to get along without a police force 
 that it would not have a police force even long after 
 crime had become as common in Mohawk as church- 
 going was. People said that the organization of such 
 a force would ' reflect upon the good name of the 
 town,' which was absurd. What they did not say 
 was that it would also raise the taxes, which was 
 what really worried them. 
 
 " But the greatest pride of Mohawk was its schools 
 — its public schools. It had eight of them, including 
 the grammar and high school, and, as far as they 
 went, they were really almost equal to the demands 
 that were put upon them. The teachers were nearly 
 all Mohawk girls ; the superintendent was a graduate 
 of some little college in the foothills of Idaho, and 
 the school board, which was regularly re-elected as 
 fast as .its individual terms expired, was composed of 
 small shopkeepers, none of whom had ever continued 
 school after the age of fifteen. 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 51 
 
 " As a matter of fact, however, this school board 
 was composed of one person, as I have found that 
 most school boards are in these happy days, when we 
 still leave two-thirds of the education of our children 
 to the tender care of party politics. You men must 
 be aware of how the scheme generally works out. 
 One member of the board, originally no better quali- 
 fied than the rest, takes an interest in the work and 
 makes a hobby of it — not a serious occupation, be- 
 cause he has his private living to earn and his polit- 
 ical boss to please; but a hobby. He likes to visit 
 the schoolrooms and have the teacher defer to him 
 and the children look awed. He likes to be known as 
 a Power. Consequently he is willing to undertake 
 most of the work; and the rest of the board, having 
 businesses of their own, are quite willing to let him 
 have his way. They elect him secretary, both corre- 
 sponding and recording; they tie up the whole job in 
 a neat little package and place it in his lap, and go 
 home to bed. After that, they meet once a month 
 and vote ' Aye ' to whatever he proposes — the unvary- 
 ing minority, representative of the other party, as 
 consistently and ineffectually voting ' No ' — and so 
 that one man becomes the real school board. It w'as 
 thus in Mohawk. 
 
 " In Mohawk the school board was composed, in 
 this manner, of Mr. Joel Nilson. Subject to the 
 interference of the municipal boss, he ran it. In all 
 practical matters of administration, Nilson was It. 
 
 " I do not propose to blackguard Nilson. He was 
 a well-intentioned man. He was honest, according 
 to the prevailing criteria. His father had held the 
 same position on the school board that Joel held, and 
 
52 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Joel so honored his father that he saw nothing but 
 aspersions upon his parent in every proposition that 
 hinted at the need of any change of school arrange- 
 ment or curriculum from the system that the elder 
 Nilson had ordained and established. 
 
 " Nilson had a wife and family, and I never knew 
 a man more devoted to his children. If the school 
 board was his hobby, his children were his passion. 
 There were four of them, but at the time I'm speak- 
 ing of only one of them remained at home. This was 
 the younger girl, and, as Nilson's love was now cen- 
 tered upon her — in accordance with that animal law 
 which lessens parental affection as soon as the off- 
 spring can shift for itself — I'll tell you particularly 
 about her in a moment. 
 
 " He believed, this school director, in all the old 
 ideas about the bringing up of children, and he had 
 brought up his own children accordingly. Jim, the 
 eldest of the lot, had left Mohawk when he was only 
 eighteen or nineteen; had married one of his neigh- 
 bor's children rather suddenly — too suddenly, the 
 other neighbors said — and had moved to Chicago, 
 where he was a floor-walker In a department store 
 and didn't get on well with his wife. George, the 
 second boy, but the third child, hadn't turned out to 
 be the marrying kind; he was rather wild, and, the 
 last time that I saw him, he was a faro dealer down 
 at Durango — somewhere in Colorado or New 
 Mexico, I remember. Lou, the elder daughter, had 
 been married off before she had a chance to develop 
 into anything positive — either good or bad — to a 
 La Crosse lumber dealer, who was twice her age, 
 but had plenty of money. This left Lena, the youn- 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL S3 
 
 gest, at home and just about to enter her second year 
 in the high school. 
 
 " I wish you could have seen Lena as I saw her 
 then. Beauty is a quality so rare that we have de- 
 spairingly dropped into the habit of attributing it to 
 mere prettiness. Very small children are occasion- 
 ally beautiful, and some women; but a girl at the 
 high-school age — almost never. Well, Lena was the 
 exception. 
 
 " She was rather tall for her years, but her figure 
 was developed to meet every requirement of her 
 height — perfectly developed, without any of that ex- 
 travagance at any one point which means poverty 
 at some other — a phenomenon so characteristic of 
 merely pretty people. In consequence, she had grace 
 of the only absolute sort— the sort that is uncon- 
 scious. To see her walk made you remember your 
 own school days and Virgil's goddesses, as you then 
 read about them and believed in them. 
 
 " I don't like our lazy mental method of classi- 
 fying everything as one ' type ' or another, but I 
 suppose you fellows would better understand me if 
 I said that Lena's type was the Scandinavian. Of 
 course both she and her parents were Americans 
 by birth, education, and ideals; but her blood was 
 Norse, and she showed it. Her hair was very plenti- 
 ful and fell in long plaits down her back, far below 
 the waist, in just that tone of ripe corn that Ros- 
 setti loved to paint and write about. Her skin 
 was clear as a brook and as pink and white as an old- 
 fashioned English rose garden. And her eyes were 
 large and round and as blue as the sea at Marseilles. 
 Her features were regular, as beautiful features have 
 
54 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 to be, and accordingly placid. I don't say she was 
 intellectual; she was just beautiful — just beautiful 
 and good and competent and clean. More than any- 
 thing else, she reminded me of an early morning 
 in spring, when the sun is fresh and the air bracing, 
 when the sky is clear, and the dew is still sparkling in 
 the grass. 
 
 " Well — there you are. Lena didn't stand at the 
 head of her school class and she didn't stand at its 
 foot. She knew all that the school had taught 
 her; she was fifteen years old, and she thought the 
 doctor brought the babies to one's house in a 
 basket. 
 
 " I had a friend in Boston, a young physician, who 
 had written what I thought was an excellent text- 
 book in physiology — excellent, I mean, for high-school 
 use. It told the truth. No hemming and hawing, no 
 lies, no evasion. No undue emphasis, either, or any 
 phrase that could be twisted into a salacious intei-- 
 pretation. Just the truth. 
 
 " Now, there's something about truth that proves 
 the fundamental stability of real morals. I don't 
 mean fake morals, or mere conventionalities, or twad- 
 dling sentimentalism ; but that bedrock of morality 
 which we have so covered up with the soil of prudery 
 and the dust of tradition that we mostly lose thought 
 of it altogether. When Truth comes Into a room — - 
 even a schoolroom — she may bring along with her 
 some companions that make the hard-shell pedagogues 
 gasp, but all the real dirtiness that was there before 
 her flies out of the window. Truth is just as essen- 
 tial an enemy of smut as light is of disease. She 
 demonstrates the other eternal verities. 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 55 
 
 " But most of us are afraid of Truth. Perhaps 
 that is only another manifestation of our savage in- 
 heritance that dreads the unfamiliar. I won't say 
 what I think about it; I only point to the fact, and 
 the fact, in this particular instance, was that no pub- 
 lic school would accept my friend's little volume as a 
 text-book. They would take it only with all reference 
 to sex omitted. 
 
 " He wrote me so, and after I'd read his book I 
 was on fire with indignation. I resolved to see what 
 Mohawk would do about it, and I set out that night 
 to call on Joel Nilson. 
 
 " I remember it was an early autumn evening, just 
 before the reopening of school. The air was warm 
 and scented. The last rays of pink were just fading 
 out of the western sky, and, though the moon had 
 not yet risen, there were one or two faint stars be- 
 ginning to glimmer in the east. 
 
 " I lived outside of the town, and my way into it 
 lay along a curving lane, heavily shaded. As I 
 turned, that evening, one of the corners in that lane, 
 I came upon a boy and girl standing facing each other. 
 I think they had been holding hands. I know they 
 drew apart rather sharply as I came into view, 
 and, whatever they had been talking about, they 
 stood quite silent till I had passed. The boy 
 was Mark Higgins, son of old Billy Higgins, the 
 political boss of Mohawk, and the girl was Lena 
 Nilson. 
 
 " Generally speaking, Fate lacks the commonly ac- 
 cepted view of what constitutes the dramatic instinct 
 — lacks it or differs with it. Not to-night, however. 
 When I got to Nilson's house, Joel was sitting on the 
 
56 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 porch and old Billy Higgins was sitting beside 
 him. 
 
 " I told them about my friend's book. I went over 
 by the parlor window, and there, in the little light 
 that came through from a lamp inside, I read them 
 the revolutionary passages. 
 
 " It was already dark on the porch and I couldn't 
 very well see my audience. Joel's figure was only a 
 tall, lank, stoop-shouldered silhouette, puffing at a 
 pipe. Higgins was smoking a cigar, and when he 
 drew on it I could just get a glimpse of his round, 
 fat, good-natured, but altogether non-committal face. 
 
 " After I had finished reading, they sat for a 
 while, smoking in silence. It was clear that Nilson, 
 utterly dumfounded, was waiting for his chief to 
 dehver the directing opinion. What Higgins was 
 waiting for wasn't clear at all. 
 
 '"Well? 'said Billy at last. 
 
 " I said nothing. 
 
 " ' Gee ! ' said Nilson. ' What do you think of it, 
 Higgins ? ' 
 
 " Higgins smoked for a bit — perhaps to marshal 
 his mazed faculties. 
 
 " ' I think,' he at last decided, ' that the schools 
 that turned down that book didn't do enough; they 
 ought to 've jailed that doctor for printin' it.' 
 
 " I suppose I should have expected this, but I 
 hadn't. 
 
 " ' What do you mean ? ' I demanded. ' Isn't it 
 the truth?' 
 
 " Nilson answered me. 
 
 " ' Truth? ' said he. ' Course it's the truth. But 
 what's that got to do with it? This world's full of 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 57 
 
 evil, but, just because the evil's here and so is true, 
 do you think that's any reason for corruptin' inno- 
 cent children by fillin' their minds with it? I never 
 heard o' such a proposition ! ' 
 
 " I tried to be patient. 
 
 " ' You don't call these particular bodily functions 
 evil, do you ? ' I asked. 
 
 " ' I call 'em somethin' they isn't any need to talk 
 about — still less to fill up children's brains with 'em. 
 Do you think I'd allow my daughter to be taught 
 such stuff? ' 
 
 " ' But they all have to learn ' 
 
 " ' They'll learn soon enough.' 
 
 " ' From whom? Where are your eyes, Mr. Nil- 
 son? Can't you see from whom they'll learn if left 
 alone- — from whom they have learned or are learn- 
 ing? From themselves or from older children, who, 
 in their turn, have learned from themselves — and all 
 learned wrong, all learned dirt instead of truth, all 
 learned their own ruin ! ' 
 
 "'Rot!' said Billy Higgins. 
 
 " ' Worse'n that! ' declared Nilson. ' It's wicked- 
 ness — that's what it is — open wickedness an' un- 
 ashamed! Think o' my Lena or Billy's Mark! You 
 have a nice opinion o' your neighbors' children, Mr. 
 Thorley, I must say! You have a nice opinion o' 
 your fellow-townspeople ! Learnin' dirt, indeed ! 
 What sort of a town do you think this is, anyhow? 
 For twenty-five or thirty years we've had the best 
 public schools of any place our size in the State, an' 
 I guess what's been so good all that time's pretty good 
 enough to-day. Learnin' dirt! Why, it's just dirt 
 that you're askin' us to teach 'em ! ' 
 
58 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " ' It ain't decent,' threw in Higgins. 
 
 " ' It's truth,' I doggedly persisted. You can't 
 argue with a man unless you have some inch of agree- 
 ment with him from which to start, and I was 
 younger then and so could only blunder about 
 fundamentals. 
 
 " ' So's thievin' the truth,' said Nilson, swaying 
 his pipe for emphasis ; ' but that's no reason for 
 teachin' our children how to steal.* 
 
 " ' You teach them honesty. Why not teach them 
 purity as well? ' 
 
 " ' We do teach 'em purity.' 
 
 "'Where? Not in the schools, Mr. Nilson, be- 
 cause your school physiologies lie by suppressing the 
 most essential facts of the whole subject that they pre- 
 tend to teach. Not in your homes, because there you 
 begin by answering your children's questions by fairy 
 tales that are direct falsehoods; and when they dis- 
 cover that these fairy tales of birth are falsehoods, 
 you merely try to stop them from thinking by a few 
 futile commands. The only way that we try to teach 
 purity is by a weak silence. Real purity is something 
 positive; it isn't negative. It's action, not stagnation. 
 When a man expects to be attacked, he prepares 
 himself for it; he ' 
 
 " ' Well,' said Higgins, ' we think a little too much 
 of our children to believe they'll attack one another. 
 We haven't got no slums in Mohawk.' 
 You have human nature ! ' 
 
 " ' We have decent men an' women for our teach- 
 ers. How do you suppose we could ask our teachers 
 to embarrass themselves by teachin' such things to a 
 roomful o' sniggerin' boys or girls? ' 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 59 
 
 " ' It strikes me that you think rather poorly of 
 our boys and girls,' I answered, ' if you think they 
 would giggle over such subjects properly put before 
 them, and rather poorly of our teachers if you sup- 
 pose that they ' 
 
 " But Nilson interrupted this time. 
 
 It's all crazy,' he declared; ' just crazy badness. 
 How do the cattle learn these things ? ' 
 
 "'They have instinct; whereas man, being a 
 civilized animal ' 
 
 "'Nonsense, Mr. Thorley! Nature provides.' 
 
 " I got to my feet. I saw that protest was useless, 
 yet I couldn't resist a parting thrust. 
 
 " ' Nature,' said I, ' provides the impulse; but man 
 has so directed Nature in everything else that he has 
 to direct her in this if he wants her to conform to his 
 own ideas of direction. Where is your daughter this 
 evening, Mr. Nilson ? ' 
 
 " ' Eh ? Lena ? What's she got to do with this ? 
 She's over to Sally Schmidt's; they're studyin' their 
 geometry together against school's openin'.' 
 
 "'And, Mr. Higgins, where is Mark? I pre- 
 sume he is at a friend's house, too — studying his 
 mythology ? ' 
 
 " Higgins was a sharper man than Joel. He gave 
 no direct answer. 
 
 " ' My boy's old enough to take care of himself,' 
 he said. 
 
 " ' I don't mean to imply,' I went on, ' that there 
 is any harm in it, but as I came into town, two miles 
 away from the Schmidt house, I saw Mark and 
 Lena in Lowrey's Lane.' 
 
 " I put on my hat and went down the walk and 
 
6o THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 through the gate: Thdy .called me back, but I 
 wouldn't turn. 
 
 " A few days later I had business that took me to 
 Minneapolis for some weeks. After that I went to 
 Daytona for my first winter in Florida. I didn't get 
 back to Mohawk for any real stay until eighteen 
 months later. 
 
 " When I did, I learned what had happened. Joel 
 had spanked his daughter and locked her up in her 
 room for a day and let it go at that. If he gave her 
 any reason for her punishment — except in so far as 
 it was a punishment for a lie — he told her only that 
 he wouldn't have no daughter o' his spoonin' around 
 country lanes with boys after dark, and he com- 
 manded her never to repeat an ofFense neither the 
 cause nor danger of which he ever elucidated. 
 Mark's father merely told his son not to be such a 
 fool as to make calf's love to young girls. 
 
 " The result was probably inevitable. Both cul- 
 prits regarded their chastisement as arbitrary and rea- 
 sonless. They disobeyed the commands. Lena, in 
 the town's phrase, ' got into trouble,' and Mark, 
 again in the town's phrase, was ' responsible.' I have 
 my own ideas as to who was really responsible. Any- 
 how, Mark never recovered from the disgrace — I 
 think he eloped with one of the waitresses in the 
 railway station's cafe some years later. His father 
 had defended Mark against Lena's charges. Lena, 
 when she saw' that her own chances were hopeless, 
 left town — ran away alone." 
 
 Thorley paused. He lit a fresh cigar. 
 "Is that all?" asked the Lieutenant. 
 
THE FATHER THAT WAS CAREFUL 6i 
 
 " Quite," said Thorley. " The rest doesn't really 
 matter." 
 
 " But you didn't see the girl again? " 
 " Oh, yes, I did. I saw her this evening. I saw 
 her as I was going through the cell-room here. You 
 know her. She was arrested a little early this week." 
 
VI 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WASN'T TOLD 
 
 NEITHER of us who saw the end of this story 
 can soon forget it. Even here, where I write 
 it — with the peaceful Jura landscape stretch- 
 ing out before me — the scene of its telling becomes 
 again clear. Looking from the window of a mountain- 
 side inn at Mesnay-Arbois, I see the white-capped 
 peaks of the nearer Alps descending through steep 
 gradations of pine-cloaked slopes and ending in tre- 
 mendous cliffs, from the foot of which, cut by straight, 
 white roads, sprinkled with pink vineyards and dotted 
 by quiet, centuries-old villages, the rich plain stretches 
 eastward as far as the eye can follow it. But from 
 me, as I turn to my story, all these things pass. 
 
 Instead, I see the narrow, high-ceihnged room, 
 with its double row of iron-framed beds. I see the 
 young, careless doctor, passing down the aisle. I see 
 the calm nurse, gliding from patient to patient. And 
 on the pillows before me I see a face 
 
 The summons had reached us at dawn. A hospital 
 attendant had come to our tenement, climbed the 
 seven flights of stairs and knocked at the door. 
 
 " There's a girl that wants to see you," he told us. 
 " She says she used to live next door, an' once you 
 loaned her a ten-spot. She says you'd know her by 
 that." 
 
 "Is it Marie?" 
 
 62 
 
THE GIRL THAT WASN'T TOLD 63 
 
 The messenger grinned. 
 
 " It might be most anything," he answered. 
 " She's down on our books as Doris White. But she 
 wants to see you two, an' I guess you'd better be 
 quick; she won't last any too long." 
 
 " She's— she's dying? " 
 
 " Fast." 
 
 "What is the trouble?" 
 
 " What you might suppose. Will you wait an' 
 take a chance o' missin' her, or will you come now? " 
 
 We went with him. 
 
 It was Marie, this Doris — Marie, who had also 
 been Vivian, and who, when her mother had pre- 
 sented the pink-and-white bundle at the church font 
 eighteen years before, had been christened Ada. She 
 looked at us out of eyes that had burned deep into 
 her head. The skin — here leprously pale and there 
 scrofulously red — was drawn as tightly as a new glove 
 over the out-thrusting bones of her face. And when 
 she saw us enter she smiled. . . . 
 
 It was thus that she told us her story. 
 
 Ada's parents had lived in a prosperous little city 
 of Massachusetts, and had in some measure partaken 
 of that city's prosperity. Their only trouble was 
 that the prosperity was acquired and not inherited — 
 the family traditions were of the sort that, being 
 the product of penury, continue, even when applied 
 to morals, to be penurious. The ancestors had been 
 forced to pinch their pennies; the descendants, freed 
 from that need, indulged the racial trait, though in 
 the direction of physical instruction. They could af- 
 ford to give their children pin-money, but they con- 
 sidered it highly improper to tell them the truth. 
 
64 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Of these children there were two : a boy and Ada. 
 The boy, as boys will— if their parents do not an- 
 ticipate them — learned for himself, and, as boys so 
 neglected will, learned wrongly. Consequently, he 
 was at school what they politely called " backward " 
 because it would never do to give these things their 
 real name. Consequently, he grew — if that may 
 be termed " growth " which is really degeneration — 
 to be what they still politely called " a little wild " — 
 still because the correct term is "improper." And, 
 again consequently — a final consequence that removes 
 him from this history— he got at last Into what they 
 designated " trouble " (which means that he brought 
 trouble on somebody else), and, having "got into 
 trouble," promptly " got out " — of the town. 
 
 The boy was by five years Ada's elder, and his 
 parents had learned nothing from their experience 
 with him. When the girl arrived at the age when 
 she should have had their advice, her brother was 
 just entering the " wild " period, and, though his 
 good father and mother were vaguely worried by 
 such casual evidences thereof as reached them, they 
 neither thought to question either the theory that 
 begins by considering a boy's mind forbidden ter- 
 ritory and ends with an assumption of the necessity 
 for " wild oats," nor yet to reflect that, this world 
 being what it is, the mind of a girl may require a little 
 attention. 
 
 With both children their system of upbringing 
 possessed the virtue of simplicity. With their son it 
 grouped the whole matter of physical phenomena 
 under a rule of non-interference. With their daugh- 
 ter It divided those phenomena under the two heads : 
 
THE GIRL THAT WASN'T TOLD 65 
 
 " Things that may be explained in words of one 
 syllable " and " Things that one doesn't speak about." 
 
 "Why?" said Ada. 
 
 That portentous query was continually upon her 
 lips. If the answer fell under the former head, they 
 gave it readily; but if it belonged to the latter group, 
 they replied: 
 
 " You are too young to understand." 
 
 " You will find out for yourself in good time." 
 
 " That is something that isn't discussed." 
 
 A common way to bring up a girl, and an easy 
 way — for the parents. 
 
 It was not, however, so easy for Ada. She began 
 by being puzzled. Then she resolved to unravel the 
 mystery by inquiring of other children's mothers ; and 
 when the other children's mothers were equally cryp- 
 tic, she was forced to put the query from her mind 
 until that now seemingly marvelous time when, grow- 
 ing old enough to understand, the answer should pre- 
 sent itself beyond all discussion. 
 
 That time came, as in the carefully shaped circum- 
 stances it was bound to do, just when Ada was worst 
 prepared to meet it. 
 
 At fifteen the girl was ignorant of all the things 
 that her parents said were not generally discussed. 
 She was the perfect product of her domestic train- 
 ing — in respect of what she did not know, she 
 was all that her father and mother wanted her 
 to be. 
 
 Does that surprise you? If it docs, you arc one 
 of two things: cither you are a man from almost 
 anywhere, or else you are a woman trained in the sort 
 of metropolitan atmosphere that — ^well, that Ada 
 
66 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 was not trained in. There are a great many men that 
 commonly say it is impossible for any girl to reach 
 the age of fifteen and not be what they call " wise "; 
 but such men merely arouse unpleasant reflections as 
 to the sort of persons their mothers and sisters must 
 be. And there are a few women that occasionally say 
 the same thing; but they are all, one way or another, 
 women whose own knowingness was, to put it mildly, 
 precocious. The truth is that most girls, if not prop- 
 erly taught, learn little of these matters until they 
 reach the age at which marriage becomes possible — 
 a fact whereof the divorce statisticians would do well 
 to take cognizance and one that sufficiently explains 
 what happened to Ada. 
 
 Ada had been to school — at any rate, she was at- 
 tending what, for want of a better name, we call 
 a school — and there, of course, she learned something 
 about everything but herself. She could solve prob- 
 lems in algebra; she could decline any noun belong- 
 ing to the first Latin declension; once a week she 
 cultivated the delights of English through the medium 
 of what was entitled " Sentence Structure and Para- 
 graph Work " ; she was able to give, on demand, the 
 dates of all the British Kings and American Presi- 
 dents, and, after some thought, she would manage to 
 tell her French teacher the amazing news that 
 " I'oncle du frere de ma tante a des souUers." 
 
 Didn't they teach physiology? Indeed, yes ! In the 
 grammar school they had given lessons from a little 
 book — lessons that provided all the information which 
 it is *' nice " for a young girl to know. In the third 
 year of the high school, if the pupil so long survived, 
 she would get the same thing over again, with more 
 
THE GIRL THAT WASN'T TOLD 67 
 
 details. She would be taught the effects of tobacco 
 on the heart; she would be shown beautifully colored 
 pictures of a drunkard's stomach; she would even 
 know all of the bones by name; she would understand 
 all about a human being save how he came to be 
 alive and how his kind continues. Then, if she went 
 to college, she could take up biology — if she cared 
 to; and when she began that study, she would 
 find her instructors assuming that she had absorbed 
 from the circumambient atmosphere the things that 
 nobody had bothered to tell her at home or at 
 school. 
 
 " But we needn't worry about Ada," sighed her 
 contented mother. " She has an inquiring mind, 
 which is a pity, but she is very calm." 
 
 She was calm — calm by the constant, unremitting 
 exercise of all the powers of suppression that her 
 young soul could master; calm through a sort of 
 chronic hysteria. She had now supplied temporary 
 answers to the questions that none of her natural 
 teachers would reply to, and those answers were 
 totally wrong. She had built makeshift walls to fill 
 the gaps in the school physiologies, and those walls 
 were just the sort over which the enemy could best 
 enter. When she was with her parents, she was what 
 they happily considered a model child; but, alone, 
 she had depths of which they never dreamed. Ig- 
 norance, you see — not innocence. She was like — she 
 was like a little girl that you know. 
 
 Then Ada's aunt, who lived in Boston, wrote, ask- 
 ing Ada to. pass the Christmas holidays in that city. 
 Ada, of course, wanted to go. 
 
 " But this is my busy season," protested her fa- 
 
68 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 ther. " I can't leave the store, and your mother has 
 already been to town for her Christmas shopping, so 
 she can't take you." 
 
 " I am old enough to go alone," said the child. 
 
 " Why, Ada ! " It was her mother that uttered 
 this ejaculation, and the words were an established 
 formula of condemnation for the expression of any 
 sentiment that was " unladylike." 
 
 " I don't care ! " pouted Ada. " I'm fifteen I " 
 
 She kept it up and she won. That was to be ex- 
 pected: the sort of parental " protection " that keeps 
 a girl in ignorance of fundamental facts is always the 
 sort that, when the test arrives, places its charge in 
 precisely the position where the ignorance is most 
 likely to prove fatal. Ada's aunt was commanded, 
 by letter, to meet a particular train at the South 
 Station; the conductor was cautioned to " keep an eye 
 on " his young passenger, and Ada, much kissed and 
 elaborately instructed, was taken, by her father, to a 
 seat in the car. 
 
 The car was crowded, but there were a few of the 
 double seats that still had only one occupant each, 
 and over these the cautious guardian cast a deliberat- 
 ing glance. 
 
 In the first sat a stolid Italian, with a red ban- 
 danna handkerchief about his dark throat; obviously 
 he would not do, because he was a foreigner, and, of 
 course, all foreigners are villains. The second pos- 
 sible place was partially secured by a young Ameri- 
 can, but the fact that he was young and of the 
 father's sex were against him. In the third seat there 
 was a woman, but she looked poor— which meant dirt 
 and roguery — and, besides, she had opened the win- 
 
THE GIRL THAT WASN'T TOLD 69 
 
 dow. It is only in European trains that citizens of 
 the United States develop a passion for fresh-air-by- 
 rail. Ada's father chose for his daughter the fourth 
 and last vacant place, because it was beside a woman 
 stout enough to be matronly and so very well dressed 
 that she must be respectable. 
 
 " May my little girl sit here ? " asked the guard- 
 ian, making his best bow. 
 
 The lady — ^you could tell she was a lady by the 
 elaborate coiffure that even her modest but expensive 
 hat was unable completely to conceal — the lady 
 looked up and smiled. Then she looked at Ada and 
 smiled more sweetly. 
 
 *' By all means," she said. " I shall be charmed. 
 Is she going alone? " 
 
 She was enveloped — the lady — in a handsome 
 traveling cloak, so that her clothes were not much in 
 evidence. Also her hands were gloved. 
 
 "Quite alone," said the father; "but her aunt 
 is to meet her." 
 
 "At Boston?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "At Back Bay?" 
 
 " No ; at the South Station. I have asked the 
 conductor to keep an eye on her, but if you " 
 
 The father hesitated. Not so the lady. 
 
 " I shall be glad to see her safely into her aunt's 
 care," said she. 
 
 That sufficed. The father dismounted and the 
 train pulled out of the station. The lady opened 
 her traveling cloak and disclosed the most beautiful 
 gown that Ada had ever seen. Then the lady drew 
 off her gloves, and, as the child's eyes grew large 
 
70 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 with admiration of the flashing rings thus exposed, 
 she patted Ada's hand. 
 
 " How old are you, my dear? " asked the lady. 
 
 " I am past fifteen," said Ada. 
 
 " Indeed? You look two years older." 
 
 Ada blushed — she did not know why, but there 
 were many things about herself that she did not 
 know, so she changed the smile to a frown. 
 
 " I wish I was," said Ada. 
 
 " Wish you were older? Don't do that. Age 
 comes soon enough. You are very pretty as you are. 
 You are extremely pretty. Don't all the boys tell 
 you so? " 
 
 Ada did not like this familiarity, but it came so 
 suddenly that, before she was aware of her own sen- 
 sation, she had rephed that she was not allowed to 
 see many boys and that she hated those whom she 
 did see. 
 
 " Why, I think a girl should be allowed to know 
 lots of boys," said the lady. " There are some lovely 
 boys that live near me. Why don't you like boys? " 
 
 " They're conceited — and bad." 
 
 " Oh, that depends on the particular ones. The 
 boys I know have lovely manners and they are for- 
 ever taking their girl friends to the theater and send- 
 ing them candy and " 
 
 " I guess city boys are different from town boys," 
 interrupted Ada. 
 
 " The boys that live near me are different," said 
 the lady; and she went on to tell Ada a great deal 
 about them. 
 
 Shortly after this, noticing the girl's eyes fixed on 
 her rings, the lady expressed her surprise that such 
 
THE GIRL THAT WASN'T TOLD 71 
 
 pretty fingers as Ada's should be undecorated, and 
 she " loaned " Ada a circlet of gold in which sparkled 
 two diamonds. The younger passenger accepted the 
 " loan " with a sullen face, but a softening heart. 
 
 " I'll tell you what we'll do," said the lady. 
 " We'll take your aunt to luncheon when we arrive, 
 and then we'll get an automobile and drive to the 
 theater for the matinee." 
 
 And next? Well, next the train rolled into the 
 Back Bay Station, and, as one Boston station was as 
 another to Ada, and as the conductor happened to be 
 just as busy as the lady expected that he would be, 
 the lady had no difficulty in getting Ada from their 
 car at that point, had small trouble in explaining that 
 the aunt must have misunderstood the directions con- 
 cerning what train was to be met and had no really 
 great annoyance in bringing Ada to the lady's own 
 house. 
 
 All this was on a Monday. On another Monday, 
 three weeks later, Ada was shipped to New York. 
 In that short time she had found an answer to some 
 of the questions that nobody had previously answered 
 for her. This answer, too, was a wrong one, but it 
 was also a living one. How comparatively brief a 
 time elapsed before we heard her story in the hospital, 
 you have already estimated. Ada — just an ordinary 
 girl, not at all a vicious girl — had become a common 
 prostitute. 
 
 As that she lived and as that she died. 
 
 " I didn't know! " she wailed. . . . 
 
 I can see her yet — here, with the peaceful valley 
 of the Jura outstretched before us, we can both see 
 her yet — in the hospital bed, with eyes that had 
 
72 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 burned deep into her skull, with the skin, now Icp- 
 rously pale and again scrofulously red, drawn tight 
 and shining over the out-thrusting bones of her face. 
 And once she smiled. . . . 
 
 " I didn't know. I wasn't bad, but I'd just never 
 been told. Is it fair? Do you think it is fair? Oh, 
 if I'd only been told ! " . . . 
 
 After all, this is a dull story and a commonplace. 
 
I 
 
 VII 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WAS ROMANTIC 
 
 « 1" ASSURE you," she said, " that the case is in 
 no wise remarkable. There are, in every con- 
 siderable American city, men that go in for 
 this sort of thing. Their real business is the securing 
 of young girls for the white-slave traffic; but, in order 
 to protect themselves and in order to pick up a little 
 money ' on the side,' as they call it, they procure 
 licenses from the unsuspecting or uncaring courts and 
 manufacture perjured evidence for persons wanting 
 divorces. In other words, they are that most un- 
 speakable of scavengers — private detectives." 
 
 This phase of the business was at that time new to 
 me, and I said so. 
 
 " I knew," I told her, " that the average private 
 detective is an unclean toad, but I didn't know that 
 he would dare " 
 
 "Why not?" she interrupted. "As a matter of 
 fact, no daring is required. He wouldn't attempt 
 it if any were. Detectives are not brave men; the 
 nature of their work makes bravery and honesty alike 
 impossible. When the detective is a white-slaver, 
 his position makes him absolutely safe. He black- 
 mails the erring wife and entraps the romantic girl — 
 and he is protected by his badge on the one hand, and 
 on the other by the hold that his alleged business 
 gives him a chance to get over his victim. I have 
 
 73 
 
74 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 had good reasons to look into the matter and I have 
 found that what I say is true over all the land." 
 
 She was sitting in the office of a well-known girls' 
 school in Indiana — one of the teachers regularly em- 
 ployed there. As I looked at her handsome, serious, 
 refined face, I felt come over me the chill of con- 
 viction; and later, acting on what she now proceeded 
 to tell me, I discovered that, at least in many in- 
 stances, what she said was the truth. 
 
 " Five years ago," she went on, " I was connected 
 with a school in Philadelphia. There I knew inti- 
 mately — you see, I am still young — the girl of whom 
 I am about to speak. 
 
 " The girl — we shall call her Madelaine — was not 
 in any way different from a great many other girls. 
 She was a strong, willful, full-blooded child — a good 
 deal of a ' tomboy ' — but with no more harm in her 
 than there is in the purely feminine type. By the 
 time she came to be eighteen and was just ready 
 for her college examinations, she was as pretty as a 
 picture — pink-cheeked, brown-eyed, golden-haired, 
 and as powerful of muscle as most boys of her age. 
 She played basketball in such a way that the other 
 girls in the school were afraid to play against her — 
 not really roughly, you understand, but just taking 
 advantage of all the strength of body that the rules 
 allowed her to employ — and she could serve a tennis 
 ball with a speed that was more like a shot from 
 a musket. 
 
 " Madelaine was rather good at most of her studies 
 — there was at first no really great trouble there — 
 but she was not fond of what are conventionally con- 
 sidered ' girlish ' things. She didn't care for sewing, 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS ROMANTIC 75 
 
 she would never have learned to cook if she lived 
 to be a hundred, and she had no mind for sitting in 
 a corner, with a college pillow under her head, read- 
 ing fiction of the marshmallow variety. 
 
 " She was the only daughter in a family of boys, 
 and I dare say that her parents had got so used to 
 catering to the tastes of their three sons who pre- 
 ceded her that they didn't know just what sort of 
 intellectual food most people considered fitting for a 
 girl. In any event, Madelaine got to reading her 
 elder brothers' books before her mother brought home 
 any by Louisa M. Alcott, and, by the time somebody 
 gave her ' Little Women,' she had hopelessly ac- 
 quired the adventure-story habit. 
 
 " Mind you, I'm not saying that the average ' girls' 
 book ' is a strengthener of the moral fiber. It is 
 anything but that, because it is namby-pamby, and 
 you can't make red blood out of soap bubbles. In- 
 deed, I've known — but that's another story — a good 
 many girls to get into trouble just because they had 
 been taught to believe that the real world was the 
 honey and moonshine that they read about in the 
 typical young ladies' piece of fiction. Nor am I say- 
 ing that the typical ' boys' book ' is any better. It 
 is equally false, in another direction; and, because 
 both are untrue, either sort is bad for its readers, as a 
 rule, no matter whether the books are read by the 
 sex for which they are written or by the other sex. 
 My point is that an increasing number of girls, as 
 every school-teacher knows, care more for the boys' 
 books, with their herculean heroes and preternatu- 
 rally wise detectives, and that these books (the old- 
 fashioned dime novel bound in cloth and sold for a 
 
76 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 dollar-fifty) are an evil influence on their reader, boy 
 or girl. 
 
 " Well, Madelaine liked that sort. She could 
 wriggle through an examination in the Iliad, she 
 could pass in Latin composition, and she could escape 
 ' conditions ' in German, history, and mathematics. 
 But what she liked — what, in fact, constituted genu- 
 ine life for her — was the ' Young Detective in the 
 Coal Regions ' series, and she honestly believed that 
 school and college were only patches of dry sand, 
 carefully walled in by severe elderly people, but 
 actually surrounded by a world of hair-breadth es- 
 capes and dashing feats of strength — a world devoted 
 entirely to the commission and detection of crime. 
 
 " One of the teachers, recognizing something of 
 the possibilities of these tendencies and knowing how 
 the tendencies are spreading among our young girls, 
 tried to take Madelaine to task. 
 
 " ' Don't you know,' said she, ' that if you keep 
 this up you'll flunk your English exams, for college? ' 
 
 " Madelaine tossed her golden hair. 
 
 " ' I've got enough to get me through without the 
 English,' she answered. 
 
 " ' But why not have the English, too, when it is 
 just as easy? ' 
 
 " ' It's not.' 
 
 " ' Don't you think " Woodstock " is exciting? ' 
 
 " The girl laughed. 
 
 " ' Exciting? That? Why, anybody that's really 
 read anything knows what's going to happen three 
 pages before Scott can get it off his chest.' 
 
 "'And "Silas Marner"?' 
 
 " * I should say not! Nothing's doing. And, be- 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS ROMANTIC 77 
 
 sides, when anything is, the author's always more 
 interested in what she thinks about what her people 
 do than she is in the people and what they do do.' 
 
 " ' Yet you must like the Shakespeare plays that 
 are prescribed. A great deal happens in them.' 
 
 " ' Yes,' admitted the sub-freshman, ' a great deal 
 happens; but, then, after anything has happened, the 
 people gas so much about it. No, thank you; when 
 I haven't any real books to read, I just make up 
 stories out of my own head.' 
 
 " The teacher reported the case as hopeless, and, 
 in June, Madelaine went up for her entrance exami- 
 nations. 
 
 " The result had been foreseen. The candidate 
 passed in most subjects, but failed lamentably in 
 English. 
 
 " There were no immediately serious consequences. 
 Madelaine, having read in her ' real ' books how such 
 things were done and guessing what had occurred, 
 waylaid the college report, abstracted it from her 
 father's mail, steamed the envelope, applied a little 
 acid to those portions of the report that did not suit 
 her, replaced them by more flattering marks, and 
 only then put the letter where her parents would get 
 it. She counted on ' making up the condition ' un- 
 known to them in her freshman year, and she had 
 committed her little crime not so much out of any 
 inherent viciousness — not even so much out of fear 
 of paternal rebuke — as from a spirit of adventure dic- 
 tated by the impulse for romance that had become 
 her governing emotion. 
 
 " Things, did not, however, turn out precisely as 
 Madelaine had expected. She went to college, but 
 
78 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 she couldn't at once make up that condition, and, 
 just as she had become passionately fond of the 
 college's social life, her father's money was engulfed 
 in a bitter business complication. At a sorry family 
 council it was almost decided that Madelaine must 
 give up her studies. 
 
 "'But I don't want to leave college!' wailed 
 Madelaine. 
 
 "Her brothers looked out of the windows; her 
 mother, face in hands, looked nowhere; her father 
 gazed at the ceiling and seemed to derive thence the 
 first faint rays of a pale inspiration. He had thought 
 of a scholarship. Without a word to any one of the 
 family, he went to the college to ' see about it ' — and 
 what he did see was the impossibility of a scholarship 
 because of what his daughter had concealed from 
 him. 
 
 " This meant that the family council was speedily 
 followed by a family row. The father was badly 
 upset by his business worries; his nerves were on 
 edge; he openly regretted that his daughter, whom 
 he upbraided for her deception, was unable to sup- 
 port herself; he said a great deal that he did not 
 mean and a few of those things which, though we 
 always mean them, we generally hold unsaid. 
 
 " His daughter went to bed crying. When she 
 heard her mother ascend, on a mission of comfort, 
 to the bedroom door, she stifled her sobs, and the 
 mother, thinking her daughter at last asleep, forebore 
 to enter. So Madelaine, lying awake through half 
 the night, planned to support herself. 
 
 " Leaving the house stealthily the next morning, 
 she went into the heart of the city. She bought a 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS ROMANTIC 79 
 
 newspaper and, over milk and rolls at a little lunch- 
 counter, consulted its minor advertisements until she 
 came upon this one: 
 
 "'WE DELIVER THE GOODS.— Divorces assured. 
 Secrecy guaranteed. Confidential investigation our 
 specialty. Quick, quiet, certain. Branches the vforld 
 over. CANNARDE DETECTIVE AGENCY.' 
 
 " The Philadelphia office, when Madelaine got 
 there, didn't look like that of a concern with branches 
 in any other country. It was situated in a dirty 
 street, it was reached by a dirty flight of marble 
 steps, and the front room, which the girl entered, 
 was an uncarpeted apartment with a littered table 
 and some well-worn handbills on the walls. 
 
 " ' I want to see Mr. Cannarde,' said the girl. 
 
 " She was looking at a short, fat woman, whose 
 eyes were bleared, whose cheeks were caked with last 
 night's rouge, whose scant hair did not hide a riotous, 
 hempen ' rat,' and who was partially garbed in a con- 
 stantly gaping and very much soiled kimono. Made- 
 laine had assumed that this was a servant. 
 
 " ' I'm his wife,' said the woman. ' He's in there.' 
 
 " She shook her rat in the direction of the next 
 room, which, apparently invited, Madelaine now en- 
 tered, to find a place considerably like that she had 
 just left. 
 
 " A fat man, pear-shaped, stood before her, dressed 
 in a dark sack suit and with shoes that were notice- 
 able because of their remarkably square toes. His 
 head was gleamingly bald on top, where beads of 
 sweat shone, and was fringed with reddish hair. His 
 dark eyes were nervous and shifty; his mustache was 
 
8o THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 like a hairbrush; from the corners of his thin lips, 
 below this, heavy, sinister lines ran up to his nose, 
 and his skin was so coarse that his cheeks seemed as 
 hard as the top of his head. Even to Madelaine he 
 was not a pleasant object to look at, but Madelaine 
 reflected that few of her detective heroes were 
 that. 
 
 " ' Good-morning,' said the man. He smiled, and 
 the girl saw that his stubby teeth were dirty. ' What 
 can I do for you ? ' 
 
 " It burst from her in one long, excited breath: 
 " ' I'm a college girl. I have education. You 
 must have use for a girl with education. I want to 
 be a detective.' 
 
 " He looked at her, blinking his shifty eyes. 
 " ' You — you want to work for this agency? ' 
 " She nodded. 
 
 " ' Why? ' The query escaped him. It all seemed 
 too easy to be quite, as he would have said, ' regular ' 
 — which means ' safe.' 
 
 Because I want to make my living. Because I 
 need the money.' 
 
 " ' Oh ! ' said the toad. Now the ground was be- 
 coming more familiar. They all needed, somehow, 
 the money! He flourished a hand on which glim- 
 mered, as he meant that it should, a diamond. ' You 
 need it badly? ' 
 
 " ' Yes.' After all, she thought that this was the 
 truth. 
 
 But I can't ' — ^his calculating eyes narrowed — 
 ' I can't employ anybody under the legal age.' 
 
 " She understood from this that he wanted her to 
 lie about her age, and lie she did. 
 
THE GIRL THAT W^S ROMANTIC 8i 
 
 " ' I am just twenty-one.' 
 
 " He watched her and at what he considered the 
 right time he said: 
 
 " ' Of course there will be a few months of appren- 
 ticeship, an' nobody gets paid durin' his apprentice- 
 ship in any business.' 
 
 " Madelaine's face fell. 
 " ' So I'll get nothing, then? ' she asked. 
 " The toad hopped forward. He tried to look 
 benevolent. He put a kindly hand on hers. His 
 trained eye told him that he had erred. 
 
 " ' Oh, well,' he answered, ' I'll make that all 
 right. Just you fill out this paper.' 
 
 " He handed her what purported to be an applica- 
 tion blank (that is one of the ways in which these 
 fellows protect themselves), and he leaned over her 
 shoulder, but not too closely, as she supplied the 
 answers. 'Do you drink?' was one query, and 
 Madelaine wrote, ' No.' 
 
 " ' But don't you? ' leered the toad. 
 " ' Of course I would if it was required by the case 
 I was working on,' said Madelaine, remembering her 
 pet heroes again. 
 
 " The toad drew a chair near her and looked at 
 her hard. Once more he felt that this was all ' too 
 easy.' 
 
 " ' You really mean that you're brave enough to 
 do this sort of work? ' he asked, still carefully word- 
 ing his questions so as to spur her to the replies he 
 wanted. 
 
 " ' Brave enough? Of course I am! ' 
 " * But you'd have to put yoursfclf, perhaps, in 
 situations that'd look compromisin'.' 
 
82 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " She didn't understand him, but, ' I'm not afraid,' 
 she said. 
 
 " The toad breathed heavily. He always breathed 
 heavily. 
 
 " ' You an' me,' he said, ' might be watchin' a 
 runaway husband an' might have to make out we was 
 husband an' wife.' 
 
 " Still she did not understand. 
 
 " ' I'm not afraid,' said Madelaine. 
 
 " ' Very well.' The toad pocketed the applica- 
 tion. ' I'll write or 'phone just as soon as I 
 need you; I'll call myself "Jack." You'll remem- 
 ber? " 
 
 " She assured him that she would. She went home, 
 still resentful against her family, still silent. The 
 next evening he called her by the telephone. 
 
 " ' Meet me in the ladies' waitin'-room at Broad 
 Street Station,' he said. ' I've got just the case for 
 you.' 
 
 " She met him. He told her that their work had 
 to do with a divorce and that he and she must go to 
 a house uptown — she still remembers that house — 
 and must there observe a husband, who would have 
 the next room. However, there appeared to be no 
 great hurry, because he took her first to a Filbert 
 Street saloon and there bought her what he assured 
 her was only claret lemonade. 
 
 " Over this drink the toad grew sentimental. He 
 told Madelaine that his wife was unfaithful, that 
 Mrs. Cannarde had, in fact, a score of casual lovers, 
 and that if he could find a girl to care for him, he 
 would run away with her. But Madelaine was not 
 overly interested in Mrs. Cannarde's affairs of the 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS ROMANTIC 83 
 
 heart, and so the toad conducted her to the house 
 where they were to watch. 
 
 How is it,' whispered Madelaine, when they 
 entered the darkened hall, ' that the maid lets you go 
 upstairs without saying anything? ' 
 
 Oh,' answered the toad, ' she knows me well. 
 Just be careful not to make any noise.' 
 
 " They went upstairs, and, as they climbed, all of 
 Madelalne's courage left her. In a girl so young, 
 physical strength does not imply moral fortitude, and 
 this child's heart fluttered until she nearly fell. When 
 the toad showed her into a room and locked the 
 door, though her every instinct now tardily told her 
 the truth, she was frald to cry out, afraid to protest, 
 afraid for her life." 
 
 The woman that was telling me this story, the 
 teacher in the Indiana school, stopped her narrative. 
 
 Now, after investigation, I know that the story 
 is a common one, that the pseudo private detective 
 is only one of the tentacles of the great devil-fish 
 that preys upon our daughters. But then it was new 
 to me and I gasped. 
 
 " How did it end? " I demanded. 
 
 " Generally," said my informant, " the victim is 
 afraid to go home after what has happened and so 
 is sold at once Into slavery. Sometimes she goes 
 home, but is recalled by threats of exposure." 
 
 "But In this case?" I persisted. 
 
 "In this, case the girl went home and made an 
 affidavit against the toad. If she ever has reason to 
 believe that the use of that affidavit will serve a good 
 
84 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 end, she will use It, regardless of all consequences to 
 herself. As a matter of fact, where others are lost, 
 she escaped the ultimate slavery, for I suppose she 
 must have been, after all, a rather remarkable girl." 
 
 " She must, indeed," I agreed. " Think of her 
 coming to you and telling you this." 
 
 " Oh, she didn't do that," answered the historian. 
 
 " But," said I, " how, then, did you learn it? " 
 
 " Simply enough — I was the girl." 
 
VIII 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 
 
 I MEANT to give this story another sort of 
 title. I meant to call it " The Girl That Loved." 
 But my Severest Critic objected. 
 
 " That won't do at all," said my Severest Critic. 
 
 "Why not?" I inquired. 
 
 " Because," said the Critic, " this girl didn't really 
 love." 
 
 " But girls, for love, have done what she did." 
 
 " They have; but this girl wasn't in love, and her 
 case is far more usual than the cases of girls that 
 behave similarly because of love." 
 
 " Then," said I, " if it wasn't love with Hallie, 
 what was it? You don't mean to say that she was 
 vicious? " 
 
 " I do not." 
 
 "Very well; what do you say?" 
 
 " Get her to give you her autobiography as she 
 gave it to me," replied my Critic. " After that, come 
 back and write the story — and after you have written 
 the story, I'l' tell you." 
 
 I have obeyed. I have seen Hallie and, quite as 
 she gave it to me, I have written the story 
 
 ******* 
 
 Hallie lived in a small town in Vermont. It was 
 not, in the real sense of the term, a manufacturing 
 
 85 
 
.HE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 /n, though there were a couple of factories in it, 
 in one of which, ranking as a little better than the 
 " hands," but far, far below any officer of the com- 
 pany, Hallie's father was employed. It was a town, 
 in fact, like many that you must be acquainted with. 
 Nearly everybody in it had lived there for a long time. 
 The younger people were all natives. Each family 
 knew — though, of course, the degrees of intimacy 
 varied — every other family; and though there had 
 now and then been little breaths of scandal here and 
 there, these breaths were unfailingly stifled at their 
 beginning, by one conventional method or another. 
 The very poorest people prided themselves upon their ' 
 respectability, upon their family's respectabihty, upon 
 the respectability of their town. 
 
 In this particular, as, indeed, in most others, Hal- 
 lie's parents were typical. Her father worked hard 
 and earned little, but he was well thought of by the 
 persons of his own class and well spoken of by his 
 employers. The former regarded him as a splendid 
 example of their sort; the latter always referred to 
 him as " a thoroughly honest and conscientious em- 
 ployee," and he himself wanted nothing better than to 
 continue to deserve such praise. HaUie's mother was 
 the feminine counterpart of Hallie's father. She 
 managed the little house and counted it as her high- 
 est honor that her neighbors should wonder how she 
 could do so well on so little. She was a good cook 
 and she kept the children — there was one other, a 
 girl of six — neat and clean. Moreover, she " took 
 in " the " plain washing," rather as a favor, from the 
 home of one of the local mill-owners. Both husband 
 and wife had been born and brought up in the town. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 87 
 
 So had their parents. And their grandparents. In 
 the phrase of the street, " they belonged." 
 
 Hallie went to the town grammar school and was 
 about to pass into the high school. All of her friends 
 went there — boys and girls together — and Hallie 
 liked the boys as much as the other girls liked them. 
 Sometimes they would slip her, these boys, little notes 
 during school hours, rather because they loved the 
 peril involved in this medium of communication for- 
 bidden by the academic authorities than that they 
 had any burning messages to convey. The messages, 
 as a matter of fact, sometimes were mere inquiries 
 concerning the answer to a sum, sometimes youthfully 
 rough-shod comments upon the teacher; and when 
 they were at all affectionate, the affection was either 
 shamefacedly expressed or more frequently hidden 
 under a thin pretense of mere chaffing. After school, 
 one or the other boys would often wait for Hallie 
 around a corner, where his fellows could not see him 
 and jeer at him, and protesting that the encounter 
 was a chance one, walk out of his own way with her 
 and as close to Hallie's home as he might go without 
 attracting the attention of Hallie's mother and the 
 smile that, from Hallie's mother, he would have re- 
 ceived as silent ridicule. 
 
 All of which, as do most girls, Hallie enjoyed. 
 In the spring and during the summer the young 
 people went for picnics into the woods that sur- 
 rounded the town. The girls persuaded their mothers 
 to assist them in preparing little luncheons for these 
 picnics, packing the food in baskets, and the boys 
 carried the baskets. Then they walked, the pic- 
 nickers, to the woods and gathered flowers and ate 
 
88 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 luncheon and at last strolled homeward in the pine- 
 scented twilight. They were unchaperoned; their 
 elders would have considered the presence of a 
 chaperon as an inherent reflection upon their chil- 
 dren's character — as un-American— and the young 
 people would have paid no attention to a chaperon 
 had one been there. 
 
 If you have been brought up In a large city you 
 may not understand the parental attitude toward this 
 particular matter; but If you have been brought up 
 In a large city, you have, whether you recognized It 
 or not, encountered a parental attitude that, allowing 
 for the unessential differences of city life, is sub- 
 stantially the same. You have encountered parents 
 who permit their children to go unchaperoned to 
 " amusement parks," and if you do not know that 
 amusement parks furnish situations which, occurring 
 quickly, abolish the necessity for the first slow steps 
 toward contact. It might be worth your while to find 
 out. If, however, you passed your youth In a small 
 town, you will have seen just what I have so far de- 
 scribed of Hallie's town, and you will at least have 
 heard of what I am about to tell you as happening 
 to Hallle. 
 
 The young people of Hallie's town had always en- 
 joyed themselves very much as Hallie and her friends 
 had been enjoying themselves. Nobody there would 
 have dreamed of questioning the propriety of such 
 things. There Is nothing wrong in young affection ; 
 there is nothing wrong in picnics. Hallie's parents 
 had lived the same sort of life when they were in their 
 youth. If, once in a long time, harm had befallen 
 somebody — well, that was the fault of the individual 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 89 
 
 somebody; their child was of different stuff. Besides, 
 their later lives had been so busy that they had for- 
 gotten much. 
 
 Yet harm did befall Hallie. 
 
 There was a picnic. 
 
 Somehow, as the boys and girls were strolling 
 through the woods, looking for flowers that would 
 not appear for at least a month, Hallie and her boy 
 companion were separated from the rest of the party. 
 
 " I'm sure there are some flowers over here in a 
 little valley that I know about," said the boy. 
 " We'll go there and get some, and then we'll come 
 back with a lot, and the other people won't have 
 any." 
 
 He was one of the older boys, this George Stevens. 
 He was in the high school and about to graduate and 
 go to work as a clerk — not as a mere laborer — in the 
 factory. He was nearly nineteen and his attention 
 was flattering. There were girls among her friends 
 that would envy Hallie. 
 
 One of these girls saw the pair as they made their 
 way in the general direction that George had indi- 
 cated. She, too, was strolling alone with a boy — a 
 boy in the class below Stevens. 
 
 " Hello ! " she cried, laughing. 
 
 " Hello I " said Hallie. 
 
 "Where you going?" 
 
 " Oh— for a walk." 
 
 The girl giggled. 
 
 " We're all to meet at the big oak at half-past 
 four," said her companion. 
 
 " All right," answered George. " We'll be there." 
 
 But at half-past four o'clock they were not there. 
 
90 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 They were not there until long after five, and then 
 some of the party had grown tired of waiting and 
 started home. As Hallie and George came up, 
 empty-handed, from one direction, there approached 
 from the opposite the girl and boy that had called 
 to George and Hallie when they were starting 
 out. 
 
 " You're late, too," remarked the girl. 
 " Are we? " stammered Hallie. 
 " Yes," George interjected. " We lost our way. 
 What happened to you ? " 
 The other boy grinned. 
 " So did we," he answered. 
 
 The incident passed as a joke. The other pic- 
 nickers assumed that the two couples had been 
 " spooning," as they called it. But Hallie, though 
 her vocabulary was limited, did not believe that this 
 was the word for the actions of the other pair, and 
 the other pair repaid, mentally, in kind. Each, as it 
 happened, did the other an injustice. 
 
 An injustice that time; but other times — other pic- 
 nics, walks after school, walks along the shadowy 
 streets of the town by twilight and into the always 
 near and always inviting countryside — followed. The 
 inevitable — or what in the circumstances was In- 
 evitable — occurred, and there was secret fear and 
 shame and repentance, all gradually subsiding before 
 the slowly dawning realization of no observable evil 
 consequences. And then Hallie took other walks, not 
 always with George, though with George oftener 
 than with any other lad. 
 
 The observable evil consequences came, however, 
 at last, as, sooner or later, they seem generally sure 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 91 
 
 to come. Hallie began by hotly denying her terrors. 
 Then she whispered them to George, and George, 
 turning pale, supported her denial. But finally she 
 convinced herself that denial was useless, because the 
 terror was a fact. 
 
 Again she sought George, and when she had con- 
 vinced him, he looked at her wide eyes, at the tears 
 that streamed down her cheeks, at the twisted mouth 
 and contorted face, at all the tokens of grief that 
 left her so unlovely to his gaze. 
 
 " Well," he said, trembling a little, " I don't see 
 what we're to do." 
 
 She drew back from him as from a fresh fear. 
 
 " You're goin' — aren't you goin' to get a job? " 
 
 "Not if this came out, I wouldn't get it; and 
 if I did, it's not enough for two." 
 
 " But, George " — she had, after all, to face this 
 new fear, and so she extended her arms to him — 
 " George, I won't mind that. I won't mind how little 
 it is." 
 
 Stevens's face flushed. 
 
 " You won't mind ! " he echoed. " I like that! I 
 guess you wouldn't mind! But I tell you I would. 
 Everybody 'd know ! " 
 
 " They'll know, anyhow " 
 
 " Not about me they won't. And I'm not so' sure 
 myself." 
 
 "Not sure?" 
 
 "No, I am not. There were other fellows; you 
 needn't pretend there weren't." 
 
 " I don't pretend. I haven't lied. I wouldn't lie 
 to you. But it was you that was first, and it was 
 you " 
 
92 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " And you think I'd want to marry a girl that 
 had been so free ? You think I'd want to marry her 
 [' even if I'd been the only one? I wouldn't marry a 
 bad woman! " 
 
 They were in a country lane. It was afternoon and 
 the sun was hot. Hallie put her hand to her head 
 and swayed a little. She leaned against a tree. 
 
 " Come on ! " commanded George. " Don't do 
 that! Somebody might come along, and then what 
 would they think? " 
 
 Always ready to his will, she staggered forward 
 beside him, her frightened eyes on his tense face, 
 his own angry eyes on the dusty road directly ahead. 
 
 " It don't matter what they think," she dully mut- 
 tered. " They're soon sure to know." 
 
 " Not about me," said George again. His mind 
 revolted. He had not intended this and he did not 
 understand why he should suffer for what he had not 
 meant to do. " Know about it? " he went on. " I 
 tell you, I don't know about it myself." 
 
 She clutched his arm, her dry lips parted. He 
 tried to draw away, but her convulsive fingers held 
 him fast. 
 
 " You think " she began. 
 
 But it is easy to believe what we want to believe, 
 and George had now convinced himself. 
 
 " It wasn't me," he said. 
 
 " George " — she almost shouted it — " I swear 
 to you " 
 
 "Shut up, will you? Do you want to call the 
 farmers? I tell you it was somebody else. You 
 can't work any of these tricks on me. I know what's 
 what. It wasn't me." 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 93 
 
 She could not move him. She tried until her 
 nerves and his patience were both exhausted, but she 
 could not change him from the position that he had 
 assumed. She went home, slunk into the house like 
 a thief, pretended to eat her supper while she was 
 sure that suspicion must be dawning in her parents' 
 eyes, went early to bed and lay all night awake, as 
 she had lain for so many nights before. 
 
 In the morning, but only because she could stand 
 it no longer, she told her mother. Violent sobs tore 
 the elder woman's throat — ejaculations of anger, calls 
 upon God to explain this unmerited visitation, and at 
 last that fatal phrase: 
 
 " I must tell your father." 
 
 On her knees, weeping in her mother's lap, clasp- 
 ing her mother's waist, Hallie pleaded against this; 
 yet all the while she knew that it must be done, and 
 done that evening it was. 
 
 The father went through all that his wife had gone 
 through — and more. He vowed that he would shoot 
 George, that he would shoot Hallie, that he would 
 shoot himself. But in the end his real self prevailed. 
 He blamed Hallie heavily — she had brought shame 
 to her parents, shame to a decent family that had 
 never known shame before — but the paramount thing 
 was not the wrong that had been done. The para- 
 mount thing was to cover the wrong and hide it; the 
 paramount thing was to evade public disgrace. He 
 would go to George's father. 
 
 The elder Stevens had, however, been forewarned 
 by his son. He hesitated to tell Hallie's father, in 
 such manifest trouble, of George's counter-charges; 
 but he sent for George, and George, driven to the 
 
94 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 wall, fought the parent with the same weapon that 
 he had used against the daughter. 
 
 The girl's father nearly struck the lad, but he be- 
 thought himself that violence might lead to publicity, 
 and refrained. In the end he returned to his house, 
 convinced that a marriage was impossible, and passed 
 hours in bringing home to Hallie a sense of the dis- 
 grace that she had brought upon her family. 
 
 Nor was the town less merciful. Who first pub- 
 lished the scandal is beyond positive telling. Cer- 
 tainly Hallie's parents wanted to delay the evil as 
 long as might be. Yet the girl's mother confided to 
 a friend that she was in the depths of a great sorrow; 
 the mother of the boy, informed by her cautious 
 husband of but half the truth, whispered to a con- 
 fidante that Hallie had made unbelievable charges; 
 the friend and the confidante told others; the others 
 remembered little things that they had seen, and thus 
 at last the town learned the truth, resented the ob- 
 loquy that Hallie had put upon its respectable reputa- 
 tion and prepared to punish the criminal. 
 
 Wherever the girl went, her fault followed. All 
 saw her and she knew it; all that saw her were 
 aware of what she had done, and, as they saw her, 
 remembered it and resented it — and this she also 
 knew. Her shame assumed a thousand shapes — a 
 different shape for each individual that considered 
 her and It. Now somebody shook a solemn head. 
 Again somebody tried to hide — or pretended to try 
 to hide — a spiteful smile. This girl pointed; that 
 man leered. There were some that sighed; there 
 were others that gasped. Many gaped and craned 
 their necks, whispering; a few frankly tittered. Out 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 95 
 
 of his own character each observer made her a new 
 object of reproach, and her sorrow-quickened senses 
 missed not one. 
 
 Four of her friends, at four different times, met 
 her salutation on the street with faces that were 
 blanker than they would have been at the impertinent 
 salutation of a stranger, until, cut right and left, 
 Hallie would speak to nobody. Little children, 
 vaguely instructed by their parents, ran away from 
 her approach, until she was afraid to show herself 
 by day and would go out only in the darkness. And 
 at last, in the darkness, one of the town idlers 
 accosted her and said something that, thereafter, 
 kept her a prisoner within the walls of her own 
 home. 
 
 • Her own home ! Hallie's mother had all the will 
 in the world to help her, but how to help she did not 
 know. She had a magnificent tenderness, but she had 
 a still greater sense of the disgrace that was upon 
 them all. Day long she wept over Hallie, but Hallie 
 knew — even if the mother did not know it — that more 
 than half of the tears contained a reproach, however 
 gentle, because more than half of them were shed 
 over that honor of the family which Hallie had 
 thrown away. 
 
 Her father did also what he could ; but he, too, could 
 do little. He had talked for a while of sending her 
 to Boston before the town could learn the truth; but 
 the town had superseded him, and he now came home 
 with the head bowed which had once been so erect 
 and with a gloom that spoke always of the memory 
 of a respectability that Hallie had filched from him. 
 
 And so at last the girl took matters into her own 
 
96 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 hands. Nearly mad from her punishment, she sought 
 to escape its continuance. 
 
 " I can't stand it ! " she moaned, between sobs, to 
 the midnight darkness of her room. " I can't stand 
 it!" 
 
 On the night of a d^y when her little sister ran 
 home crying because her playmates had been forbid- 
 den to consort with a child whose family included a 
 wicked woman, Hallie stole away. She had a little 
 money in a toy savings box, and this she used to get 
 her to New York. There she kept herself alive by 
 begging on the street until she went to the hospital. 
 She did not know that in New York there were in- 
 stitutions to care for the sort of girl that a Vermont 
 town could not abide, and so, as she was too unskilled 
 to work and too afraid of death to starve, she soon 
 put her baby in an asylum and herself upon the street. 
 
 She is still there. 
 
 * * * * sj: * * 
 
 That is Hallie's story as Hallie gave it me. I 
 wrote it as my Severest Critic commanded, and my 
 Severest Critic has read it through. 
 
 "Well?" said I. 
 
 "Well?" said the Crititc. 
 
 " You were right," I admitted. " Once I got the 
 facts at first hand, I found that, in Hallie's case, it 
 wasn't a question of love. She was too young." 
 
 " Yes," said the Critic, " she was too young. Hal- 
 lie was one of the girls that are weak. She made a 
 mistake and she couldn't stand its consequences." 
 
 " I'm not sure," I submitted, " that the lesser char- 
 acters in Hallie's story were altogether blameless." 
 
 " They certainly were not blameless," replied the 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS WEAK 97 
 
 Critic. " What Hallie couldn't stand was the dis- 
 grace; she couldn't stand the scorn of her friends, the 
 jeers of the whole town; she couldn't stand the 
 knowledge that, much as her parents regretted what 
 she had done, they regretted still more its mere dis- " 
 CO very." 
 
IX 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WENT TO SEE 
 
 RACIAL generalizations are always dangerous. 
 Concerning the Chinaman, they are almost 
 always misleading. The only safe thing to 
 say of him is that he is not widely understood, that 
 things not understood have an essential lure, and that 
 the lure of things not understood is a hazard of peril. 
 Otherwise, Yellow and White are one. 
 
 Save for his unenlightenment, which is the fault 
 of his governmental traditions, there is, indeed, noth- 
 ing wrong with the Chinaman — as a Chinaman. 
 When his traditions do not interfere, he is personally 
 as polite as a French shopkeeper and economically 
 as honest as a French peasant. This Young China is 
 certain some day to improve; the rest she is equally 
 certain some day materially to alter. But in the mean- 
 time the traditions remain, and though in Pekin they 
 are as frank as Broadway or Pacific Avenue, in the 
 yellow strips of our American cities they are woven 
 through the crooked, cluttered streets like a web that 
 is well-nigh invisible, but wholly tenacious. It is not 
 good for the Occidental to become entangled therein. 
 
 Yet this last it is hard for the Occident to learn. 
 Except the West, nothing tempts the West quite so 
 subtly and strongly as the East or any manifestation 
 of the East. It calls us. The shuffle of the heelless 
 shoes, the clatter of the beaded curtains, the pungent 
 
 98 
 
THE GIRL THAT WENT TO SEE 99 
 
 scent of the joss-sticks — they all call us. They are 
 the Celestial Dragon, gaping eternally for the sun. 
 We are young, we are obvious, we are hurried; how, 
 indeed, can it be that we should long resist what is 
 aged, mysterious, serene? 
 
 This, although she did not so concretely formulate 
 it, was the question that, in the end, presented itself 
 to Muriel. 
 
 Muriel was of the West, Western. She was of what 
 San Francisco calls " an old San Francisco family." 
 This is to say that her grandfather had been born and 
 raised in Akron, O., and had followed the Argonauts 
 to the coast in 1850, there to arrive in time to filch 
 his share — or somebody's share — of the Golden 
 Fleece. As he had then straightway married the 
 newly-arrived sister of another pioneer (who came 
 from Clyde, N. Y.) , and as the pair had one son, who 
 was a Californian by birth, the stock was clearly as 
 San Franciscan as it was old. 
 
 In America, however, even the natural forces work 
 more speedily than they work in alien climes, and the 
 law of compensation does not long delay. As a rule, 
 the generation that acquires begets a generation that 
 disburses. Muriel's old San Francisco family was no 
 exception. 
 
 Of course Muriel's grandfather had really cornered 
 a great deal of money — so much that one man must 
 have some difficulty in getting rid of it all. Still Mu- 
 riel's " poppa " did his best. The ability to devote 
 one's life to a single ideal was in his blood, and, by as- 
 siduously cultivating that ability, this son of a Jason 
 accomplished wonders. He married at the age of 
 forty, because he felt that he had by that time earned 
 
loo THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 a little diversion; and as his wife proved a true help- 
 meet, the pair so far succeeded in reducing the weight 
 of the family bank-account that when Muriel was 
 born both parents were thoroughly discontented with 
 life and one was forced to earn their living by pre- 
 tending to work in a bank. 
 
 But Muriel also had her Inheritance. If she was 
 bom Into a household that let no day pass without 
 regretting the better days which had passed so long 
 before It — and without any effort to conjure those 
 days into a new life — she was just as surely born (or 
 so the discredited believers in heredity would assure 
 us) into a family that was by nature inquisitive. She 
 felt, very early, that she had to be a pioneer. Her 
 childhood was fed on stories of the grandfather that 
 had listened to the ancient call and had obeyed It: 
 
 Something hidden, go and find it, go and look behind the Ranges, 
 Something lost behind the Ranges, lost and waiting for you. Go! 
 
 It was, since his money had disappeared, only the 
 pioneer Instincts of this grandparent that made her 
 any better than the other girls in school — the girls 
 whose fathers had come to San Francisco but a score 
 of years ago and whose fathers' fathers were born 
 across the Atlantic. If she were to retain her supe- 
 riority, she must cease to follow: she must explore. 
 In brief, then, Muriel had an inquiring mind and 
 an adventurous heart — a combination large with peril. 
 When she studied physics, she was not content with 
 being told the result of experiments; she was not 
 even content with watching the underpaid instructor 
 perform those experiments. She insisted upon per- 
 forming the experiments herself. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WENT TO SEE loi 
 
 When she was only fifteen one of her young com- 
 panions told her that another friend had said that a 
 certain Japanese beggar who frequented the ware- 
 house district would, for " two bits," bite his hand till 
 it bled. Muriel immediately started downtown. 
 
 " Where are you going? " asked her companion. 
 
 " I'm going to see if it's true," said Muriel. 
 
 And go— and see — she did. 
 
 Matters were bad enough with Muriel's family 
 before the big 'quake, but after it there came a long 
 period when they were almost desperate. The shock 
 wrecked the family house, which was not " on the 
 hill " where the family house had once been, and the 
 fire came so close to ruining the bank that, in the first 
 terrible days when the sick city fought its way back 
 to rehabilitation as an injured man fights his way 
 back to health, Muriel's father lost his job and could 
 no longer even play at work. The result was a domes- 
 tic atmosphere so highly surcharged with storm that 
 the daughter passed just as much of her time as she 
 could pass in any other atmosphere accessible. 
 
 Always she continued " to go to see." Long be- 
 fore she had been told that whisky produced intoxi- 
 cation. In order to prove this, she had taken three 
 drinks from the dining-room decanter and retired to 
 bed, whereafter, the theory being thus demonstrated 
 to her entire personal satisfaction, money would not 
 have hired her to touch whisky again. She could still 
 remember the day when she had " jumped five hun- 
 dred " with her " skipping-rope," merely to discover 
 whether that exercise would, as her school friends as- 
 sured her, result in either exhaustion or a fainting 
 fit. She had smoked one of her father's cheap cigars 
 
I02 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " to see what tobacco was like," and she had leaped 
 from the second-story window in an effort to procure 
 the sensation obtained by the blond-haired circus- 
 lady that " looped the loop." 
 
 None of these things was of itself evil. None was 
 undertaken with the purpose of offending other people 
 or of harming herself. None resulted in any bad 
 habit. But all confirmed the habit of " going to see." 
 
 You will, however, remark one peculiarity: Mu- 
 riel's explorations had thus far missed Chinatown; 
 she had as yet failed to encounter the lure of the 
 Orient, had never yet seen the arched Dragon gaping 
 for the sun. But that is easy of explanation, and, 
 indeed, if you know San Francisco, you will have 
 supplied the explanation for yourself. 
 
 In the days before the big 'quake, Chinatown in 
 San Francisco was " one of those things better left 
 undiscussed." In other words, it was supposed to be 
 a spot set aside, by mutual male consent, for that 
 contradiction in terms, " a necessary evil." The men 
 all knew about It specifically, the boys all pretended 
 to know about it theoretically, and the married women 
 were all, though very vaguely, aware of its existence. 
 Yet to one's daughter — well, one might about as well 
 stop living on Pacific Avenue and begin talking about 
 Pacific Street. 
 
 After the 'quake things changed. The splendid 
 city climbed by its own effort from its own ashes and 
 in the genuine glory of that accomplishment con- 
 vinced itself that, v/here much was new and all was 
 good, nothing that was old and evil had survived. 
 San Francisco had been burned; Chinatown had been 
 burned to cinder. The city had risen from the dead 
 
THE GIRL THAT WENT TO SEE 103 
 
 because it was vital, but, because It was diseased, the 
 town must have perished. One could, therefore, 
 now speak more freely of the latter, and Muriel 
 chanced to overhear her father talking of it to her 
 mother. 
 
 " At any rate," said the father, with that righteous 
 calm wherewith the one just man discourses of the 
 unjust that have perished for their sins, " if the fire 
 has done nothing else, It has helped San Francisco 
 by destroying Chinatown." 
 
 " And," inquired his wife, " was Chinatown really 
 such an evil? " 
 
 " It was a plague spot — though, of course. It's 
 impossible for you to understand just how and why. 
 Parts of it weren't safe for a white man without a 
 guide — not to mention a white woman." 
 
 " But I'm sure Mrs. Gambell used to go there to 
 teach In Sunday school." 
 
 " Oh, the Sunday school ! That wasn't the real 
 thing — that wasn't the real Chinatown. The white 
 girls that went into the real Chinatown rarely came 
 back." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Can't you guess? " 
 
 " I should think the police would have rescued 
 them." 
 
 " That just shows how little you know about It. 
 Besides, In the end they didn't want to come back. 
 When a Chinaman wants a white slave, he doesn't 
 have to imprison her; all he has to do is to teach her 
 the opium habit." 
 
 Muriel's mother shuddered. 
 " How dreadful ! " said she. 
 
104 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 "Yes," said the father, "it was dreadful; but 
 it is all ended now." 
 
 Muriel, who had been sitting in the shadow, ven- 
 tured a comment. 
 
 " I think I'll walk down there some day," she re- 
 marked. 
 
 Her father turned quickly in his chair. 
 
 " I didn't know you were listening," he declared. 
 " / think you will do nothing of the sort." 
 
 " The idea ! " echoed Muriel's mother. " You see, 
 Fred, what it means to a child to have a father who is 
 unable to provide the kind of a bringing up that will 
 properly protect her." 
 
 That criticism might have served to divert the 
 paternal attention from daughter to mother, but 
 Muriel again interposed. 
 
 " If the fire's wiped it all out," said she, " I don't 
 see what harm there can be in going there." 
 
 " Well," responded her father, " you sha'n't go." 
 
 Muriel shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 " Then I don't believe it is all wiped out," she 
 replied. 
 
 She was sixteen years old, and the passion for 
 exploration had developed with indulgence. Within 
 a week she had " gone to see." 
 
 The first time, though her family was never in- 
 formed of it one way or the other, she did not go 
 alone. With two other girls and a pair of boys she 
 made the excursion in " a slumming party." They 
 passed the beaded curtains and ate of strange, savory 
 food. They inhaled the incense, they tossed the 
 "prayer sticks," and, in the crowded streets, they 
 gave smile for smile to the little yellow men that 
 
THE GIRL THAT WENT TO SEE 105 
 
 shuffled by upon heelless shoes. There was no harm 
 done, and the boys and girls hked it; but what most 
 laid its hold upon Muriel was the sense that for each 
 shadow which was revealed there was a great gulf of 
 enchanting darkness which was kept mysteriously 
 hidden. 
 
 What, she perpetually asked herself, was this that 
 was concealed? She resolved to continue going until 
 she saw it. 
 
 She returned, by day, to the restaurant where they 
 had dined, now with a companion and now without. 
 She got to know the Chinese dishes by name and was 
 proud of it. Soon she got to know the waiters also 
 by name, and of this she was still prouder. Once 
 she ventured into the cafe alone in the early evening, 
 and the proprietor himself waited upon her — he was 
 flatteringly polite. 
 
 After that Muriel returned more often, and now 
 always alone. She felt that she was rapidly paving, 
 through the proprietor, a way toward the revelation 
 of the mystery: 
 
 Something lost behind the Ranges. Over yonder. Go you there! 
 
 At home, conditions had become worse and were 
 rapidly growing intolerable. Her father had been 
 sitting idle, in the faith that the bank would end by 
 sending for him; but the bank, having accepted a 
 politician's notes in return for the politician's sub- 
 sequently broken promise to secure for it a large por- 
 tion of the city's deposits, sent instead for a receiver, 
 and Muriel's father, who had been expensively edu- 
 cated in the trade of general incapacity, now pro- 
 ceeded to sink his remaining money in drink and to 
 
io6 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 lavish his remaining energy in quarrels. Muriel 
 found solace in Chinatown, amusement in the pro- 
 prietor's fascinating descriptions of tilings Oriental, 
 and credit for her meals and tea. 
 
 One night she broached the subject of opium- 
 smoking. 
 
 The proprietor raised his long, thin eyebrows. 
 
 "That is all exaggerated! " he said — his English 
 was better than Muriel's. " Some of my country- 
 men smoke too much of the opium, but not many — not 
 nearly so many as those Americans that drink too 
 much of the whisky." 
 
 " Yet it's a bad habit, isn't it? " asked Muriel. 
 
 " Yes," replied the proprietor, " if you acquire it. 
 But it is nonsense, this talk that says you get the habit 
 from one smoke. You do not get it from a hundred 
 smokes. A man — even a woman — can be temperate 
 in opium as well as in wine." 
 
 "Are you?" 
 
 " Do I not attend to my business? " 
 
 " But you do smoke? " 
 
 " Perhaps once a month. I lie down in a beautiful 
 room. I think of good things. I smoke and go to 
 sleep, and the opium makes me dream only of the 
 beautiful and the good. The next morning, re- 
 freshed, I return to my business." 
 
 Muriel wanted to hear further about those dreams, 
 and the proprietor of the restaurant told her. She 
 had not read the more glowing portions of De 
 Quincey's " Confessions," as so many foredoomed 
 victims have done — she had not read any of " The 
 Confessions " — but the proprietor sufficed. She 
 smoked a pipe of opium in his rooms that night, and 
 
THE GIRL THAT WENT TO SEE 107 
 
 the only thing that happened was a sound sleep, a 
 complete forgetfulness of the family jars, the memory 
 of which had lately been breaking her rest. Nobody 
 disturbed her. When she woke, the proprietor, still 
 pohte, brought her breakfast, and all that she had to 
 complain of was a slight nausea and the absence of 
 the predicted dreams. 
 
 " The sickness will not return," her instructor re- 
 sponded, " and the dreams will come the next time 
 or the next. There is no hurry; one can wait." 
 
 " I don't know that there'll be any next time," said 
 Muriel. 
 
 " Not soon," said the proprietor. " You must not 
 get the habit. You must be temperate, as I am. One 
 can wait." 
 
 So there was a next time. There were several of 
 them. Muriel explained them to her parents by 
 saying she spent the nights with a schoolgirl friend 
 that had moved " over to Oakland." Then there 
 were more next times, not a month apart, and during 
 one of them the proprietor reminded her of her bill 
 at the restaurant. . . . 
 
 Muriel had said that she was going to Oakland for 
 the week end. When she came out of the stupor, a 
 new week was half over. At first she was afraid to 
 go home. Then she did not go. And then she did 
 not want to go. 
 
 When her parents had at last told the police, and 
 the police had at last, after searching everywhere else, 
 reached San Francisco's Chinatown, the restaurant- 
 proprietor had sold Muriel to another Chinaman, and 
 she was in the Chinatown of Chicago. They never 
 found her. At the time I saw her, she was the slave. 
 
io8 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 of a Chinaman near Harrison Street, in Boston. 
 That Chinaman had to keep her because, though she 
 used to be pretty, she was not pretty any longer, and 
 so her last master could not sell her. 
 
 The well-nigh invisible web had proved tenacious. 
 Muriel had gone — and seen. The shuffle of the heel- 
 less shoes, the clatter of the beaded curtains, the 
 pungent scent of the joss-sticks — these things had 
 called her, not in vain — 
 
 Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes 
 On one everlasting Vyhisper day and night repeated so: 
 
 Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges, 
 Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and vpaiting for you. Go ! 
 
X 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR 
 
 IT was In New York, after seven o'clock, when 
 Nada turned into the cluttered street in which 
 she lived. She had walked north on Broadway 
 to Tenth Street arid then dropped into the great tide 
 of black-clad girls sweeping eastward on their way 
 from work. Their faces were tired and their feet 
 heavy, but they had, most of them, a certain assur- 
 ance of expression, a security of gait; and this, Nada 
 reflected, must be because they were at least sure 
 that the rooms to which they were going would con- 
 tinue to house them, because they knew that supper of 
 some sort would be waiting, because, to-morrow morn- 
 ing, they would turn westward to work for which 
 they had been definitely employed. Nada's step was 
 more weary than any of these, and her face was dull 
 and expressionless. 
 
 Yet she was a pretty girl. In spite of hunger and 
 seedy clothes, in spite even of the devil of doubt that 
 in her heart was slowly growing into a devil of de- 
 spair, she was pretty. Her hair was plentiful and 
 black, her pale face was delicately designed, and her 
 large dark eyes were even beautiful. It was a raw 
 night in early December, but Nada's coat was in the 
 pawnshop on the corner, and one could see that pov- 
 erty had not yet robbed her figure of all its possi- 
 bilities. 
 
 log 
 
no THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Somebody had, in fact, already seen as much- 
 somebody in a large, Hght-colored overcoat, with 
 enormous shoulders constructed regardless of the 
 wearer's shoulders beneath, and a carefully brushed 
 derby hat set aslant upon a round head. This some- 
 body was following Nada. 
 
 He had taken his stand on a crowded Broadway 
 corner just as the working day ended, holding a ciga- 
 rette between his yellow fingers and shifting from 
 one high-heeled shoe to the other while he scanned the 
 passing flood of home-going girls with the keen, cold 
 eye that a horse dealer uses to estimate the horses 
 driven by him in a horse bazaar. He seemed to hesi- 
 tate about several of these girls; now and again he 
 made false starts after this one or that, returning, 
 when a few steps had been taken, to his post. But 
 when he saw Nada, uncertainty fell from him and he 
 tracked her through the crowded streets to this comer 
 of the street in which she lived. 
 
 Nada was, however, too occupied with her own 
 thoughts to feel that chill which runs through the 
 body of one that is watched. The evening was cold 
 enough to provide a more commonplace explanation 
 for chilliness. She turned the corner. 
 
 The street was badly lighted, it was narrow, and 
 it was swarming with returning workers, shouting 
 children, and old women with shawls over their heads, 
 carrying little bundles of provisions or kettles of beer. 
 On each side were rows of houses, all much alike and 
 all converted, by tortuous means, from the housing 
 of one family, for which they were intended, into 
 small apartments for the housing of many families. 
 The man in the light overcoat with huge shoulders 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR iii 
 
 caught up with Nada. He took off his well-brushed 
 derby, showing a head covered with sleekly arranged 
 hair. 
 
 " Pardon me," he said, " but aren't you Miss Ray- 
 nor?" 
 
 Nada had been so deeply preoccupied that it was 
 hard for her to realize the meaning of any interrup- 
 tion. She raised her dark glance slowly to the speaker 
 and saw that he was a very young man indeed, little 
 more than a boy, in fact. She did not then under- 
 stand that his lean face was preternaturally knowing, 
 or what was the meaning of the broad red edges of 
 his drooping lids. 
 
 " What did you say? " she inquired. 
 
 " I asked if you weren't Miss Raynor." The 
 young man smiled pleasantly and his voice, though 
 rough, was by no means repellent. " I'm Mr. 
 Mitchell. Don't you remember meetin' me at the 
 Ivy Social Club's dance? " 
 
 " No," said Nada, still puzzled; " you're mistaken. 
 My name isn't Raynor." 
 
 "Not Miss Raynor?" Mr. Mitchell seemed al- 
 most incredulous. " But I sure must have met you at 
 the Ivy Social las' Sat'day." 
 
 " I'm afraid not," said Nada. " I haven't gone to 
 any dance for a long while." 
 
 " I'm sorry. I beg your pardon." 
 
 " There's no harm done." 
 
 " No, there ain't, is there? " Mr. Mitchell smiled 
 again, but he was standing before her now and she 
 could not conveniently move on. " You see," he ex- 
 plained, " I thought we'd met, an' I was just goin' to 
 ask you to come on down Second Av'nue to a good 
 
112 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 cafe with me for supper. I feel like a big, red steak 
 this evening, an' I know the best place for one in 
 N' York. But, not knowin' me, you wouldn't want 
 to go, would you ? " 
 
 Nada's stomach cried within her, but with the cry 
 came a warning. She had heard often enough of men 
 
 that took girls to supper and then She couldn't 
 
 go, of course, and yet she could not be certain that 
 the polite Mitchell really meant any harm, so she did 
 not speak angrily. 
 
 " I'm in a hurry," she said. " I'm much obliged 
 to you, but I must get home." 
 
 " Oh, that's all right. You live near here? " 
 
 " Two doors below." 
 
 " Well, I'm sorry. Good-evenin'. Hope I'll have 
 the pleasure of seein' you again." 
 
 Mitchell bowed and left her, and Nada, a few 
 steps farther on, turned into her own house. 
 
 She climbed the dark stairway, reeking with the 
 smells of cooking from the many apartments, and 
 ascended to the landing just below the roof. Then, 
 without knocking, she opened a door. 
 
 Small and close as the room was, it was swathed 
 in shadow. The only light came from a dim lamp, 
 shadeless, set upon a bare center table. The table 
 was heaped with several piles of small, brightly 
 colored bits of cloth — here a pile of green, there one 
 of white, and beyond a pile of purple. Cups of glue 
 and brushes stood between the piles, and, just beside 
 the dim lamp, was a little mound of something that 
 looked like flowers — a strange note in surroundings 
 so sordid. 
 
 A frail woman of what might be almost any age 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR 113 
 
 over forty sat at the table and worked with the paste 
 and the bits of colored cloth — and coughed. Three 
 children, eleven, nine, and six years old, sat about 
 her, also working. They were pasting together imi- 
 tation violets for hat trimmings. They pasted from 
 five o'clock in the morning until twelve at night. 
 They were Nada's widowed mother and Nada's sis- 
 ters and brother. They got one cent for every one 
 hundred and forty-four " violets " that they made, 
 and their combined highest daily wage was ninety-six 
 cents. 
 
 As the door closed behind Nada, the woman 
 looked up, coughing, She had eyes like her daugh- 
 ter's, but more haggard. 
 
 "No luck?" she asked, for she saw Nada's face 
 as the girl drew nearer the table. 
 
 The girl shook her head. She had worked in a 
 necktie factory, but the factory had been shut down 
 for a month, and Nada had ever since been tramping 
 the streets in search of a job. 
 
 " I think by this time I've been to every place in 
 N' York," she said dully. 
 
 She sank into the one remaining chair. 
 
 The mother said nothing. They two had long 
 since passed the stage of tears, and there was really 
 nothing to be said. But the youngest of the children 
 set up a thin wail, in which the nine-year-old boy 
 began fretfully to join. 
 
 " I don't see why you can't get nothin'," he whim- 
 pered. " I'm tired." 
 
 Nada achieved a smile. 
 
 " Go to bed," she commanded, " you an' Irene. 
 I'll do your work to-night." 
 
114 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " But I want some supper! " protested the small- 
 est child. 
 
 The mother got up, coughing, and presently 
 brought a pot of coffee and two bits of bread. Irene 
 and her brother ate and then lay down upon a thin 
 mattress on the floor in a corner. The others ate 
 while they worked, Nada's stiffened fingers resuming 
 the endless task of the sleepers. 
 
 " One man," she said, apropos of nothing, " asked 
 me if it was true that people like us kept the coal in 
 the bathtub." 
 
 " What did you tell him ? " inquired her eleven- 
 year-old sister. 
 
 " Told him I didn't know, because we didn't have 
 no bathtub an' we didn't have no coal." 
 
 They worked for an hour in silence. 
 
 " This is Tuesday, ain't it? " Nada asked at last 
 
 Her mother nodded. 
 
 " You seen 'em about the rent? " said Nada. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "What'd they say?" 
 
 " They can't wait a day longer'n Sat'day." 
 
 There was another long silence, broken only by 
 the mother's coughing. 
 
 Nada knew what caused that cough. She bent her 
 head over her violets in order that her face might not 
 be seen and its expression read. Twice it was on her 
 lips to tell about Mr. Mitchell, but each time she for- 
 bore to add to her mother's burden of worry. 
 
 " Well," she said at last, " I'll try again to-mor- 
 row." 
 
 She did try on the morrow, but she knew that her 
 quest was hopeless, and hopeless it proved. There 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR 115 
 
 was the same long round of interviews, the same long 
 list of refusals, the same long tramp through the 
 windy streets. The factories were full, the shops 
 were full, there were no vacant places in the kitchens 
 of the restaurants, and the domestic-employment 
 agencies, filled with girls looking for general house- 
 work, had need only of trained cooks and experienced 
 children's nurses. Nada turned homeward in the 
 chilly darkness and at the corner of her street met 
 Mr. Mitchell. 
 
 "Hello!" said Mr. Mitchell. 
 
 He smiled and raised his hat. Nada noticed that 
 it was lined with folded white satin; it reminded her 
 of a child's coffin. 
 
 " Good-evenin'," said Nada. 
 
 She looked at young Mr. Mitchell. He seemed 
 so well fed and warm and prosperous. 
 
 " You look tired out," he ventured, in his most 
 tenderly concerned manner. 
 
 " Then I don't look a lie," said Nada. 
 
 " You must have a hard job." 
 
 " I've got the hardest there is." 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 The answer escaped Nada before she could 
 check it. 
 
 " Lookin' for one," she said bitterly. 
 
 Mr. Mitchell was plainly pained. 
 
 " You don't mean you're out o' work? " he gasped. 
 
 " You know I am," said Nada. 
 
 She looked him steadily in his bloodshot eyes, and 
 his eyes fell. 
 
 " Of course I didn't," he lied. 
 
 Nada shrugged her thin shoulders. An uncon- 
 
ii6 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 trollable desire came over her to put her case before 
 this stranger. 
 
 " My father's been dead two years," she said; 
 " I've been out of a job goin' on to five weeks; my 
 mother an' the three children paste hat flowers at a 
 cent the twelve dozen; they're finishin' the last order; 
 everything's hocked that can be hocked; we'll be 
 turned out if the rent ain't paid Sat'day, an' my 
 mother's got consumption." 
 
 Mr. Mitchell gasped again. 
 
 " What was your job ? " he asked. 
 
 " Neckties." 
 
 "Fired?" 
 
 " No. The shop shut down." 
 
 "Won't it start up again soon? '* 
 
 " It won't never start up. The firm's busted." 
 
 " An' you " He glanced at her narrowly, and 
 
 then glanced swiftly away. " You need some 
 money? " 
 
 " I ain't livin' on my interest." 
 
 " A girl as good-lookin' as you," said Mr. Mitchell 
 slowly, " oughtn't to have much trouble in a town 
 like N' York." 
 
 She had expected this, but, now that it had come, 
 she had learned all that she thought she wanted to 
 learn. She was certain now what he was, and he 
 filled her with disgust and loathing. 
 
 " Well, I do have trouble," she said, pretending 
 to misunderstand. " But," she added, " I'd better 
 be running along now." 
 
 " Hold up a minute," said Mitchell. " Don't you 
 want to get that supper with me?" 
 
 " Thanks; but I've got to run along." 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR 117 
 
 " But maybe I can find you somethin' to do." 
 " If you can " — again speech leaped from her 
 without will of her own — " you let me know. I'm 
 by here every night at this time — an' you know It." 
 
 She turned away and again went home. 
 
 And at home everything was just as It had been 
 the night before — every one of so many nights before. 
 The mother and the children were working in the 
 garret room. The children were hungry and the 
 mother coughed. 
 
 That was Wednesday night. 
 
 On Thursday the same thing happened. There 
 was the same series of heart-breaking refusals, the 
 same series of closed doors, the same long trudging 
 through the cold streets — and at the home corner the 
 same warm, comfortable, well-fed, ready-to-help 
 Mitchell again. 
 
 " Hey, there ! Wait a minute ! " he commanded. 
 
 " I've got to hurry," Nada answered, and she 
 shivered, but not from cold. 
 
 " But I want to tell you somethin'." 
 
 " To-morrow evening," she said — for she would 
 give convention one more chance. 
 
 When she entered the room she found the two 
 younger children already abed. 
 
 " What's the trouble? " she inquired, with a tired 
 glance at their huddled forms. 
 
 The mother coughed. 
 
 " They're sick," she answered. " Irene's got a 
 fever an' pains in her stomach. So's he." 
 
 " They're hungry," said Nada. 
 
 " Yes," said her mother; " they're hungry." 
 
 Nada began to work. Presently she said, 
 
ii8 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " Mother " And then she stopped. 
 
 "What is it?" asked her mother. 
 
 " I heard of a sort of a chance this evenin'," said 
 Nada. 
 
 The mother's hand shook so that some of the glue 
 from the brush she was holding dropped upon the 
 table. 
 
 "No? Is it— is it true?" 
 
 " It's only a chance. I'm — I'm not sure." 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 Nada lied. 
 
 " It's night work," she said. " It's in an all-night 
 restaurant on the Bowery. Washin' dishes." 
 
 " Thank God 1 " said her mother. 
 
 " But it ain't sure. Of course it's hard " 
 
 " I know you'd do it for us, though, Nada. You've 
 always been a good girl." 
 
 " An'," continued Nada, looking hard at the white 
 violet she was making, " I'd have to begin about eight 
 o'clock an' work on till the middle of the mornin'. 
 I was so glad to hear of it, I forgot to ask the wages. 
 It ain't sure, neither," she repeated; "but the boss 
 says he's thinkin' o' firin' one of the girls, an', if he 
 does, I'll get her place. It'll help a lot." 
 
 " Thank God! " said the mother again; and then 
 suddenly she drooped over the table and began to 
 cough and sob. 
 
 So, having prepared an explanation to cloak the 
 worst, if the worst should happen, Nada went out 
 upon her quest once more the next morning. She 
 was seeking her last chance. 
 
 But the chance was not apparent. Nada strained 
 every nerve to find work — and she found none. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR 119 
 
 Then she started back. 
 
 Once or twice she hesitated. Once or twice she 
 stopped short. There was a half hour when she 
 turned westward, out of her course, fighting. There 
 was a time when she 1:hought of entering the street 
 by the far end, where Mitchell would not see her; 
 and there was another time when she thought of the 
 river. But then she would hear her mother's cough; 
 she would hear the whimper of the hungry children. 
 So she went on. 
 
 When she met Mitchell, she startled him by her 
 outspokenness. 
 
 " See here," she said, " if I go into business for 
 you, what'U I earn ? " 
 
 He drew back, flushing. 
 
 " What do you mean? " he asked. 
 
 "Oh, you know! What'll I earn ? " 
 
 " Well — it depends on you." 
 
 "Enough to bring some money home?" 
 
 " Lots of it." 
 
 "How much?" 
 
 " I tell you, it depends on you, kid." 
 
 She winced at the epithet. From such a mouth, 
 she knew what it implied. But she went on : 
 
 " I'm thinkin' about my mother an' the children. 
 How much'll there be for them? " 
 
 " She'll be on Easy Street." 
 
 "Eight a week?" 
 
 " Maybe ten." 
 
 " I, can get home afternoons? " 
 
 " Sure you can." 
 
 " Then wait here a minute." 
 
 " But, kid^-" 
 
I20 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " Wait ! " she called over her shoulder, and ran 
 upstairs and into the room that had been her home. 
 
 She did not look at her mother, but she flung her 
 arms about the woman and burst into hysterical 
 weeping. 
 
 " It's all right ! " she laughed wildly. " You'll 
 have some money in advance on my wages to-mor- 
 row, mother. It's all right!" 
 
 "You got the dish-washin' job?" asked the 
 mother. 
 
 " Yes — yes, I got the dish-washin' job." 
 
 " Thank God, thank God ! " sobbed the mother, 
 and they wept together. 
 
 Then Nada stood up. She was very white and 
 calm. 
 
 " I must start right away," she said. 
 
 The children were dancing because she had a job. 
 
 "You shall have a drum," she said to the boy; 
 " and you, Irene and Meta — you shall have new 
 dresses." 
 
 And she kissed them. And went out. 
 
 When she approached the smiling Mitchell, it 
 was with the face like the face of a virgin led to 
 the Minotaur. 
 
 "Well?" he said. 
 
 She glanced past him, down the street. She saw 
 Tessie Connor, a girl from the same tenement house, 
 approaching — a girl that was a clerk in a large de- 
 partment store — and she did not want Tessie to ob- 
 serve Mitchell. 
 
 " I'm ready," she said. " Hurry." 
 
 But Tessie had already seen. She came running 
 up to them. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS POOR 121 
 
 " Nada," she gasped, breathless from her run, 
 " I've got news for you. The store's takin' on extra 
 help for over the holidays — they need 'em for the 
 two-week rush — an' I've spoken to the basement boss 
 an' he can give you a job till Christmas." 
 
 So Nada was reprieved. 
 
 But Christmas was only two weeks away, and after- 
 ward 
 
XI 
 
 THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 
 
 THE Statistician, the Philanthropist, and the 
 Man That Only Writes were talking things 
 over. 
 
 " Let us take again," said the Statistician, " those 
 figures from Waverley House. Waverley House is 
 a place — it wouldn't want the forbidding name of 
 ' institution ' — in New York City where certain kind 
 and experienced persons are permitted by the lower 
 courts to take and care for girls for whom, being 
 young in wrong, there seems to be a chance of refor- 
 mation." 
 
 The other two nodded. 
 
 " Well," continued the Statistician, " in one year 
 Waverley House had three hundred of these girls. 
 Out of that three hundred the largest number — 
 ninety-five, to be exact — had previously been domestic 
 servants." 
 
 The Philanthropist looked up, stroking his gray 
 mustache. 
 
 " And what," he asked, " would you figure as the 
 general percentage of former domestic servants in 
 this class at large? " 
 
 " I should say about sixty per cent.," answered the 
 Statistician. 
 
 " Exactly," chimed the Philanthropist, " and yet 
 here is our young friend that does nothing but write, 
 
 122 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 123 
 
 laying the blame for the vast bulk of the Social Evil 
 upon Poverty." 
 
 The writing-man made a timid suggestion. 
 
 " Don't you think," he inquired, " that poverty 
 forces the girl to become a servant in a household 
 where the work is far in excess of the wages, and 
 that then hard work and poor quarters force her to 
 seek recrefttion among conditions where her ' fall ' is 
 easily accomplished? " 
 
 " I do not," rephed the Philanthropist. " If sixty 
 per cent, of these women come from the servant-girl 
 class, your poverty theory falls to the ground, for 
 there has never been so great a demand for servants 
 as there is now, and the servants' wages have never 
 been so high." 
 
 " You don't believe that servants are inherently 
 vicious merely because they are servants? " 
 
 " Certainly not ! " 
 
 " Yet you admit the truth of these statistics? " 
 
 " I do, and I say that is where your poverty theory 
 goes to pieces. We need servants in our homes and 
 we pay them well." 
 
 " Do you? " asked the Mere Writer, who is a very 
 mild man. " But if the statistics are true, if serv- 
 ants aren't inherently vicious, and if poverty isn't to 
 blame, what is to blame ? Do servants ' go wrong ' 
 as an inevitable result of your home influences? " 
 
 The Philanthropist grew angry. His gray mus- 
 tache bristled. 
 
 " You are an impudent puppy! " he said. 
 
 " If I answered my last question in the affirmative I 
 might seem so," the Writer answered; "but may I 
 have a moment to make myself clear? " 
 
a 24 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " You may have all night." 
 
 " I sha'n't want an hour. I shall merely tell you 
 a couple of stories — true stories, too." 
 
 " All right," assented the Philanthropist, who is a 
 good man and wants to do good in the world; " fire 
 away." 
 
 " In the first place," began the Mere Writer, 
 " there was Tillie — Tillie was not a lady's-maid or an 
 expert cook or anything of that sort. They may or 
 may not get high wages. I know very little about 
 them, but I do know that they are in the minority of 
 their class; that their condition isn't typical. Now, 
 Tillie was typical; she was just a strong, healthy 
 girl that set out to be a maid-of-all-work; she 
 came of poor people; her parents were dead; it 
 was necessary that she earn her own living. So 
 she got a job as chambermaid in a big Detroit 
 hotel. 
 
 " There's a good deal to be said against the treat- 
 ment of the servants in some of our large hotels — 
 where they're sometimes herded like cattle and often 
 treated as worse — but that hasn't anything to do with 
 the present case. Besides, as she came to look back 
 on it in after days, Tillie didn't think this hotel half 
 bad. At any rate, she had regular hours and regular 
 duties. Both were carefully defined, and she was not 
 expected to exceed either. She wasn't asked to do 
 work outside of her prescribed line, and when her 
 ' day ' was over she was definitely through her tasks. 
 Besides, the people that stopped at the hotel, though 
 there was now and then one that complained, treated 
 her, on the whole, with consideration. Take it by 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 125 
 
 and large, I should say that she was pretty well 
 satisfied. 
 
 " But a rather well-to-do Rochester woman came 
 to the hotel with her husband, who was in Detroit on 
 business, and this woman — we'll call her Mrs. Sandys 
 — took rather a shine to Tillie. That is to say, she 
 gave Tillie so to understand. Afterward, Tillie 
 heard that Mrs. Sandys was accustomed to taking 
 shines to other people's servants, thus taking the 
 servants (after she'd had a chance to observe their 
 fitness upon practical test) and also saving the money 
 that would otherwise go in the form of intelligence- 
 office commissions. 
 
 *' At any rate, the trick worked with Tillie. Mrs. 
 Sandys managed things so that she saw Tillie handle 
 a few plates and cups and saucers. 
 
 "'What wages do you get here?' asked Mrs. 
 Sandys. 
 
 " Tillie told her. 
 
 " ' But don't you sometimes think,' asked the 
 woman from Rochester, ' that it would be nicer for 
 you if you had a place as a housemaid in a good 
 family ? ' 
 
 " Tillie said that this had not, as a matter of fact, 
 occurred to her. 
 
 " ' Oh, but I am quite sure it would be nicer,' said 
 Mrs. Sandys. ' You would then have the advantage 
 of a good home among refined surroundings and all 
 that sort of thing, you know.' 
 
 " She spoke in her most elegant manner, and her 
 phrases were large in implication. She talked on and 
 on, and Tillie brightened. Was Tillie hving in the 
 hotel? No, Tillie was 'living out.' Was it a long 
 
126 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 walk to and from work ? It was. Hum! Well, the 
 woman from Rochester thought it might just be pos- 
 sible to make a place for Tillie in the Rochester home. 
 And about the wages? Oh, yes, to be sure; about 
 the wages. Well, Mrs. Sandys would offer — did 
 offer — what sounded like very good wages to Mrs. 
 Sandys. 
 
 " ' But, counting tips, I'm getting a good deal 
 more than that in this place, ma'am,' said the puzzled 
 Tillie. 
 
 " ' Of course you are, my dear; but you say 
 you're living out — I think you said you were living 
 out?' 
 
 " ' Yes, ma'am.' 
 
 " ' Well, with me you will save your lodging and 
 board, and, of course, they will be far superior to 
 what you are getting now. You mustn't forget that, 
 you know, and you mustn't forget the advantages of 
 service in a refined home.' 
 
 " So TiUie took the job. 
 
 " And what did she find? The Rochester people 
 had a handsome house, but their servants slept in low 
 garrets, badly ventilated. The family ate good food, 
 but its domestics would have to give first-rate reasons 
 why the family's Sunday roast wasn't large enough 
 for the family's cold lunch on Monday and the 
 family's hash at Tuesday's breakfast. Mrs. Sandys 
 knew about as much of administration as she knew of 
 the true economy of labor — which was precisely noth- 
 ing at all. The ' refinement ' of the employers was 
 pretty much limited to occasions when company was 
 present; it certainly had not expended itself in the 
 planning of the servants' quarters; and Tillie's bene- 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 127 
 
 fits from the ' home life ' were largely gathered while 
 she was making the beds and emptying the slops. 
 
 *' The family consisted of the father and mother — 
 the former that easy-going type of American husband 
 who considers any interference with household mat- 
 ters as below the dignity of masculinity — a homely 
 daughter, who had her own ideas of what servants 
 should be, and who was far enough beyond the usual 
 marrying age to be generally critical; one son in 
 his middle teens, who wanted to be a deal older, 
 and a small boy and girl of ten and five years, respec- 
 tively. Each one of these persons, excepting the 
 father, gave orders that perpetually clashed with the 
 orders given by all the others ; each individual in the 
 family seemed to consider all the servants as his 
 peculiar and especial property. 
 
 " As for the servants, there was a nurse for the 
 children, a cook, a man that combined the duties of 
 gardener and coachman — and Tillie. Because one of 
 these was always being called upon to perform tasks 
 that properly belonged to another, they were in a 
 continuous condition of confusion. 
 
 " Tillie, who straightway found that she was ex- 
 pected to wait on table as well as do the regular work 
 of a chambermaid — not to mention helping to wash 
 the dishes — slept in a small room with the cook. 
 The room had one bed, one pitcher and basin, the two 
 trunks of its occupants, and a narrow window. Tillie 
 rose at dawn and was at the call of duty until half 
 an hour after the family went to sleep. She was not 
 permitted to receive visitors on the premises — indeed, 
 there was no room in which she could receive them — • 
 and her holidays were a mere farce. She had the 
 
128 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Thursday afternoon and evening ' off ' in one week 
 and the Sunday afternoon and evening ' off ' in the 
 next; she should have had both Thursdays, but she 
 and the cook alternated then so that there would be 
 someone on hand to prepare the Thursday supper. 
 When she did get out she had always to be back by 
 ten o'clock. 
 
 " There were other trials, too. The youngest child 
 developed a malignant contagious disease — I think it 
 was scarlet fever — and Tillie was forced to share in 
 the nursing, on peril of losing her job. Then the ten- 
 year-old boy one afternoon flew into a temper and 
 spat in Tillie's face, and, as Tillie seized him by the 
 arm to drag him before the bar of parental justice, 
 parental justice sailed down the hall in the persons 
 of Mrs. Sandys and her spinster daughter. 
 
 " ' Good heavens, Tillie ! ' shrieked Mrs. Sandys. 
 ' What on earth are you doing to Master James? ' 
 He spat in my face, ma'am,' said Tillie. 
 " ' I didn't! ' howled Master James. 
 Yes, he did, ma'am,' persisted Tillie. 
 She's a liar! ' James cried. 
 James,' said the spinster sister mildly, ' you 
 shouldn't use such language — really.' Then she 
 turned blazing eyes on Tillie. ' Of course,' she con- 
 cluded, ' we accept my brother's word.' 
 
 And in any event,' supplemented Mrs. Sandys, 
 ' I never permit my servants to correct my children.' 
 '* I could tell you more. There are not a few cases 
 where the ' fall ' of the serving-maid has been brought 
 about by the husband of her employer or by his eldest 
 son, but nothing of that sort occurred in the Sandys 
 house. There Tillie's relations with the lad in his 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 129 
 
 middle teens consisted of cleaning him and smug- 
 gling him upstairs when he came home drunk at 
 night, and of pressing his clothes three times a 
 week. 
 
 " The point, however, that I'm making is that 
 Tillie was reduced to a state of poverty. I don't 
 mean financial poverty alone, but other sorts of 
 poverty as well : as poverty of surroundings, poverty 
 of lodgings, poverty of recreation and joy — against 
 which there finally came a perfectly natural reaction 
 that itself was misdirected into evil channels by 
 the conditions that her employers imposed upon 
 her." 
 
 The Mere Writer stopped. He leaned back in his 
 chair in the attitude that the lawyer assumes when 
 he has rested his case. 
 
 " That's all," he said. 
 
 "There's no more?" asked the Statistician. 
 
 "Why should there be?" responded the Mere 
 Writer. " The only place that Tillie could meet 
 friends was on the street. She went to the street, and 
 in the end she stayed there. I met her the other 
 night. What do you think of the case? " 
 
 " Not typical," said the gray Philanthropist. 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Because most people don't treat their servants in 
 that way." 
 
 " There are many that treat them worse, I grant, 
 but, though the details differ, the large majority of 
 householders don't treat their servants any better." 
 
 " I don't agree with you," said the Philanthropist. 
 " Many families have servants' parlors. My servants 
 
130 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 have a parlor and friends may see them there — I am 
 quite certain that they may, quite certain." 
 
 The Mere Writer smiled. 
 
 " Have you any idea," he asked, " how many 
 families employing servants there are in the United 
 States? I'm not asking the Statistician," he hur- 
 riedly explained as the Statistician's face lighted to 
 reply; "I'm asking you." 
 
 " No," answered the Philanthropist, now wary of 
 traps; " I'm sure I don't know." 
 
 " Still, a good many? " 
 
 " Yes, of course." 
 
 " Many thousands in fact? " 
 
 " I suppose so." 
 
 " Well, how many of them do you honestly sup- 
 pose treat their servants as well as you treat yours? " 
 The Philanthropist fidgeted. 
 
 " The Sandys family isn't in the majority," he in- 
 sisted. 
 
 " I'll tell you what sort is in the majority," said 
 the Mere Writer, " the sort that, once in a while, 
 runs a bit short and makes its servant wait overtime 
 for her pay." 
 
 " I don't beheve it," said the Philanthropist. 
 
 "Ask the Statistician," suggested the Writer; 
 and, as the Statistician nodded assent, the Writer 
 went on: "Also, barring the native negroes, the 
 majority of domestic servants in our cities and large 
 towns are foreign-born. They are poor, in all the 
 senses that TiHie was poor; they are desperately 
 lonely; they don't know where to look for company 
 and they drift into the wrong sort of places in search 
 of it. 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 131 
 
 " This brings me to my second story, the story of 
 Lena. I think you'll admit that it's typical, any- 
 how." 
 
 The Writer filled his pipe. 
 
 " Lena," he began, " worked for a thoroughly re- 
 spectable and thoroughly well-meaning family in 
 Brooklyn. She began by trying to do the right thing 
 by that family, according to her lights, and the family 
 tried all through to do the right thing by Lena, ac- 
 cording to its lights. The only trouble was that the 
 family's lights weren't any brighter than the average. 
 
 " There were five persons in the family, — let's say 
 their name was Randall, — the father, who earned a 
 fair salary as head of a small department in a big 
 concern; the mother, who thought he ought to earn 
 more and pretty consistently tried to convince her 
 neighbors that he did; one boy, who went to the 
 high school, and two small girls. Lena was the only 
 servant. 
 
 " Lena had to get up first and put the fires in order. 
 Then she had to get breakfast for Mr. Randall, 
 whose job roused him pretty early. The theory was 
 that the family should all breakfast together, but, as 
 usual, that theory rarely worked out. The boy had 
 next to be wakened (Lena making several trips from 
 the kitchen range to hammer on his bedroom door) , 
 because the high school was a considerable distance 
 from the Randall house. Then came the girls, whose 
 school was closer by. As a rule, Mrs. Randall lay 
 abed and breakfasted after the others had gone. So, 
 though no one breakfast amounted to much, Lena 
 generally had to get a bunch of them every morning, 
 
132 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 and, because she had so much to do, she did it on 
 one cup of tea by way of breakfast for herself. 
 
 " Then, while Mrs. Randall lingered over her 
 bacon and eggs, there was the daily conference about 
 the marketing. 
 
 " ' Whatever shall we get for to-day, Lena ? ' Mrs. 
 Randall would yawn. 
 
 " And Lena would suggest something and be told 
 that she was extravagant, and Mrs. Randall would 
 suggest something else and be told that they had had 
 that yesterday. 
 
 " It was a difficult problem. Randall made his 
 wife one regular weekly allowance for spending 
 money and another for the marketing, and Mrs. 
 Randall liked to augment the former by economies 
 with the latter. She wasn't a spender, but she liked 
 clothes that were a little better than her husband's 
 salary justified. It seemed to her, too, that money 
 spent on food brought very small return — you could 
 always tell whether a person was well dressed, but 
 who ever knows what a person eats, anyhow? Mrs. 
 Randall's sole difficulty was Mr. Randall; he was 
 what she called ' a hearty eater,' and one of the prob- 
 lems of Lena's life was to establish a working syn- 
 thesis between Mrs. Randall's economies and Mr. 
 Randall's appetite. 
 
 " Still, the mistress was sure that she did not 
 shoulder too much upon the maid. Mrs. Randall 
 herself made the beds and ' did the dusting.' 
 
 " Meanwhile, Lena wasn't what you'd call idle. 
 Every weekday she cooked luncheon and dinner as 
 well as the breakfasts. On Monday she did the 
 heavy family washing, Mrs. Randall helping out 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 133 
 
 by taking care, on that day only, of the dirty dishes. 
 On Tuesdays Lena got through as much of tl^e iron- 
 ing as her other duties would permit, and that job 
 she finished on Wednesdays. Thursdays were her 
 easiest days; she had Thursday afternoons and even- 
 ings free — after she'd got the supper ready in ad- 
 vance, and, of course, with the understanding that 
 she'd wash the dishes on her return at 10 P.M. On 
 Friday she would have to sweep practically the whole 
 house, and on Saturdays she'd bake and scrub. 
 Lastly, there was Sunday, when the family dined at 
 one-thirty on a dinner that required all the earlier 
 part of the day to prepare, and every other Sunday 
 Lena could go out as soon as she had ' cleaned up ' 
 the debris of that dinner and ' laid out ' a cold supper 
 ■ — much as they lay out a corpse — which, by straining 
 every nerve, sometimes got her clear of the house 
 as early as half-past four, and left her with more 
 dishes to wash when she came back. 
 
 " There were always, in fact, dishes to wash before 
 she went to bed, and there was always extra sweep- 
 ing to do. The little girls would make candy — and 
 leave the dishes. Mr. Randall, en route for sleep, 
 would ' potter around ' (it was his own phrase) get- 
 ting himself a late bite — and leave the dishes. All the 
 children would come into the house with a fine for- 
 getfulness of the doormat, and then, anyhow, there 
 were the front steps and the pavement to be 
 cleaned. 
 
 " In short, Lena generally ended her day ex- 
 hausted. 
 
 " There was also a system of fines. When Lena 
 broke a dish, the price of the dish was deducted from 
 
134 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 her wages. Wrongly, but not unnaturally, Lena sus- 
 pected Mrs. Randall of raising the price of all china 
 as fast as it fell to the floor, and so Lena did not 
 always report every smash-up. Moreover, the mis- 
 tress kept all pies and cakes under her own lock and 
 key — ' to keep them from the children,' she explained 
 with a glance toward Lena that Lena didn't miss; 
 once or twice, though the servant always needed her 
 money on pay-day, Mrs. Randall would be a week 
 late in payment, having herself run short; and regu- 
 larly, before the meat left the table, the head of the 
 house sliced from it as much as he thought Lena 
 ought to consume, while his wife doled out vege- 
 tables to the same extent. Many of the cakes that 
 Lena made she never so much as tasted. 
 
 " There's no use describing Lena's room. It was 
 just what Tillie's had been, only not half the size. 
 It was cold in winter and hot in summer and close 
 all the year 'round. But you can see by all this about 
 how much of real living fell to Lena's share of exist- 
 ence. 
 
 " Besides which, Lena had troubles of her own 
 that Mrs. Randall never dreamed about. Over in 
 a Boston asylum there was the orphan son of the 
 maid's sister, and the maid liked to pinch her pennies 
 to send him trifles. Across the ocean there was 
 Lena's old mother, and, come what might, a regular 
 sum of money had to go into a foreign money-order 
 every month. 
 
 When you get through the supper dishes,' Mrs. 
 Randall had, at the outset, said to her, ' I suppose 
 you'd like to have a chance to see some friends? ' 
 
 " ' Yes, ma'am,' said Lena. 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 135 
 
 Very well, I don't object to some of your women 
 friends calling on you in the kitchen then.' 
 
 " But Lena had only a few women friends, and 
 these friends being in similar positions, had no more 
 chance to call on Lena than Lena had to call on them, 
 so, when the postman began to smile on her and the 
 milkman evinced signs of an awakening interest, she 
 inquired: 
 
 "'What about gentlemen friends, ma'am?' 
 
 " Mrs. Randall hesitated and answered at last ac- 
 cording to her conscience. 
 
 " ' It wouldn't do,' she said, ' for you to have 
 a lot of men coming here in the evenings, but I sup- 
 pose there'd be no objection to one if he was really 
 nice.' 
 
 " She stopped there, because she suddenly realized 
 that, whereas numbers were not to be thought of, one 
 might spell marriage and rob her of a good servant. 
 Yet she wanted to be just, and she therefore con- 
 cluded : 
 
 " ' But he mustn't come before you are through 
 your work and he must leave before ten o'clock.' 
 
 " Lena chose the milkman, and the milkman called 
 regularly once a week for the half-hour permitted. 
 He had a good job and, as Lena was fair-haired 
 and blue-eyed and pretty, he fell in love with her. 
 He meant to marry her, and Lena knew it, only, in 
 the kitchen, even honorable love-making reverses the 
 process of the parlor: it begins with the kisses and 
 approaches the declaration and proposal gradually. 
 
 " Of this reversal Mrs. Randall was unaware. 
 One night, the lovers' ardor having driven from their 
 minds all thought of time — quite as if they were 
 
136 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 parlor lovers, you see — Mrs. Randall overheard the 
 sound of the milkman's voice from the kitchen at 
 the forbidden hour of half-past ten, and flung 
 open the door to find Lena and her young man 
 kissing. 
 
 " Now, Mrs. Randall, I insist, hadn't an unclean 
 mind. She simply, as I've said, didn't understand the 
 etiquette of kitchen love-making, and she was secretly 
 inclined toward the belief that true love does not ex- 
 tend downward to the grade of milkmen. Conse- 
 quently, she lost her temper. She made charges that 
 sent Lena crying to the garret room, and she so fright- 
 ened the milkman by the apparent difficulties of his 
 wooing that he never renewed it. Anyhow, after 
 that Mrs. Randall got milk from another wagon, and 
 the milkman never came back." 
 
 Again the Mere Writer paused. 
 
 "And then?" asked the Philanthropist. 
 
 " Oh," said the writer, " the rest of Lena's story 
 is simply the end of Tillie's over again. Lena was 
 a faithful servant and stayed a long time, but at last 
 the whole combination of circumstances forced her 
 into meeting men friends in the streets on her Thurs- 
 day and Sunday nights out, and one of these friends, 
 assisted by the circumstances of the acquaintance- 
 ship, finally deceived her. I call her case typical." 
 
 " I don't," said the Philanthropist. 
 
 " Seventy-five per cent, of these unfortunate 
 women," began the Statistician, " have records that 
 forbid, us to believe them open to forcing either into 
 or out of wickedness. Their records are such as show 
 that the gentler feelings " 
 
THE WOMEN THAT SERVE 137 
 
 " I saw Lena in the Night-Court a week or so 
 ago," interrupted the Mere Writer reflectively. 
 " She had occasion to hand me a couple of letters 
 addressed to her. Those letters showed that she'd 
 never yet failed either the little orphan in Boston or 
 the old mother across the sea." 
 
XII 
 
 THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 
 
 MONG the letters that reached me while these 
 sketches were appearing in serial form was 
 one from a woman in Atlanta, Ga. In it she 
 tells me the story of a girl with whom she was once 
 intimately connected, and she concludes: 
 
 " You see how it was with Alice. She is not a ' White Slave,' 
 but it seems to me that she is just as much a danger to society as if 
 she were — perhaps more of a danger than if she were; for, though 
 the White Slave suffers more and is a menace to others, Alice and 
 girls like her, suffering less directly, walk among their fellows 
 and sow seeds of evil when none suspects them. The White Slave 
 is at least known, but the Alices take their victims unaware. 
 
 " And yet you must note from what I have written that Alice 
 wasn't altogether to blame. She came to that city clean and un- 
 suspecting. The woman she fell in with was married to a pro- 
 fessional man and had a respectable appearance and some friends 
 who were even Society people, or said she had. She took Alice to 
 that bohemian club and taught her to drink. 
 
 " Then slowly she taught her other things, and at last turned 
 her over to a young West Virginian who was one of her (I mean 
 the married woman's) lovers whenever he happened to go North 
 on what he called 'business' and left his wife at home. 
 
 " I think that whoever is dealing with this whole problem can't 
 afford to leave out of consideration such women as the one I am 
 telling you about and the one that Alice has become. From what 
 I have heard, this sort are increasing in our cities and are spread- 
 ing harm among a class of girls that would otherwise lead good 
 lives." 
 
 Now, with all that my correspondent writes, I do 
 not entirely agree ; but in the main she is right. The 
 situation that she describes is a commonplace and an 
 
 138 
 
THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 139 
 
 increasing commonplace. The type is growing and 
 it is at least more insidious than the " White Slave " 
 type. Its passion is to spread evil. 
 
 Moreover, my correspondent mentioned the name 
 of the woman that corrupted Alice. Oddly enough, I 
 know that woman. 
 
 Should her picture be included in the present gal- 
 lery? For some time I have thought so; now this 
 letter confirms my opinion. Because her methods are 
 at once so disastrous and so insidious — because they 
 threaten a grade of society usually supposed to be 
 exempt — they should be revealed. So, changing 
 names and places — even substituting one or two minor 
 incidents for other incidents similar, but not precisely 
 the same — I shall tell you something of this woman's 
 history. It may be that some day I shall have to tell 
 it all; but that would mean a novel — and one which 
 I am loath to undertake. 
 
 Only a few months since I met her again, this 
 woman that I had last seen as a young wife, in Mans- 
 field, O. I had been a small boy on the previous oc- 
 casion; seventeen or eighteen years had passed, and 
 time had done much with her; but she had done 
 more with herself. 
 
 I remembered, in a flash, her wedding day. I re- 
 membered her as she came up the aisle on her proud 
 father's arm. She was tall, then, slim, and erect, 
 with a perfectly proportioned, willowy figure, her 
 fine dark hair waving under the filmy bridal veil, her 
 brown eyes large and clear and true. In Mansfield 
 they used always to say that she had "style"; but 
 here in Pittsburgh 
 
 Her father had made what was considered almost 
 
I40 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 a fortune in the War of the Rebellion ; he sold mules 
 to the government, and he was the sort of patriot 
 that does not mind cheating his country. The old 
 stock-farmer evolved a scheme whereby he could sell 
 the same mule twice. Perhaps it was because he 
 repented that old Lozier took to drink. Anyhow, he 
 did take to it, and some of her friends said that 
 Martha boasted of forcing the whisky upon him until 
 he was sufficiently mellow to surrender some extra 
 money. 
 
 I heard that Martha's marriage was not happy. 
 Somebody told me that she returned to Mansfield 
 with her daughter and gave it out that Conroy, her 
 husband, was dead. Once she went away to live in 
 Paris and came back with stories of her life there 
 that rather shocked her old friends. She developed, 
 at any rate, a liking for companions a great deal 
 younger than herself, and, until he married a placid 
 nonentity from a local boarding-school, there was a 
 good deal of gossip concerning her affair with young 
 Billy Eward, whose people, though they lived in 
 Piedmont, had always been friends of the Loziers. 
 
 Yet it was with the still married Eward that I met 
 her just as she was coming out of the Duquesne cafe. 
 
 She was not the girl that I had seen married that 
 day in Mansfield. She was a little stooped now and 
 what had once been sHmness was become scrawny 
 angularity. Under the ridiculous hat that was de- 
 signed for a woman fifteen years her junior, her hair, 
 dry and brittle, was touched with gray, and one loose 
 strand wandered vaguely over eyes that were dull, 
 bloodshot, and shifty. She had been drinking, and 
 her cheeks were flushed, but the rest of her face was 
 
THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 141 
 
 the color of putty and the outer skin seemed separated 
 from the under. 
 
 " Mrs. Conroy? " I ventured, half in doubt of her 
 identity. 
 
 She laughed, displaying the faintly yellowing teeth 
 of the woman that has been cultivating cigarettes. 
 
 " Not that for ever so long," she said. " I'm Mrs. 
 Dominic now." 
 
 I did not press the point; I could feel her mentally 
 retreat from it. 
 
 "And are you living in Pittsburgh?" I asked of 
 Eward. 
 
 *' I am," said Mrs. Dominic. 
 
 But Eward also answered. 
 
 " Oh, no I " he said. " I'm only stopping off here 
 on my way to New York on business." 
 
 I reflected that Pittsburgh was a strange stopping 
 place for a Piedmont man en route for New York, 
 and then I noticed that Eward was winking at me 
 over his companion's shoulder. He had a face with 
 skin like sandpaper, wide nostrils, and eyes that 
 blinked like a satyr's. 
 
 " Billy always stops to see his old friends when 
 he's going to New York on business," laughed the 
 woman. 
 
 We chatted for a moment more on the curb, and 
 then Eward plucked furtively at my coat-tail. 
 
 " Mrs. Dominic has to get away to a tea," he 
 said. " We mustn't keep her any longer. Walk 
 along to the Fort Pitt with me and have a drink." 
 
 The woman bowed. 
 
 " At six o'clock, then," she said tp Eward, and 
 turned away. 
 
142 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 The West Virginian gave a great sigh of relief. 
 
 " I thought I'd never shake her," he said. " She 
 can drink more than any man I know, but, once she 
 gets her claws on you, she'll never let go." 
 
 " Then, of course," I suggested, " you'll not get 
 into touch with her this evening? " 
 
 " Of course I will. I've got to. I'm afraid of 
 her. She'd make trouble for me with my wife. I've 
 been trying to break this thing off for three years 
 and I haven't managed it yet." 
 
 "What about her own husband?" 
 
 "Who? Dominic? Oh, he's a good fellow, but 
 he's afraid of her, too. Besides, he has an affair of 
 his own ; everybody but his wife knows that." 
 
 " What's his business? " 
 
 " His business is being Mrs. Dominic's husband, 
 and that's trouble enough for one man. He would 
 have made a good lawyer once, but Mrs. D. taught 
 him to drink. Now his practice Is a joke. He 
 comes of good people, but they couldn't stand for his 
 marriage, so Martha deals him out a share of the 
 allowance that her father sends her, and, of course, 
 poor Eddie can't quarrel with his meal ticket." 
 
 Eward told me more. Some of it I could not at 
 the time believe, but much of it I afterward found to 
 be true not only of Mrs. Dominic in this city, but of 
 other women like her in other cities. Martha's pas- 
 sions had devoured her, but still continued to flame. 
 While she maintained upon one hand the fiction of an 
 acquaintance with the extreme and ragged fringes 
 of " Society," on the other she indulged without stint 
 a craving for making younger women into whzit she 
 had herself become. 
 
THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 143 
 
 " She has three divorces now to her credit," said 
 Eward, " and I know of two girls on the streets that 
 would never have been there if they hadn't fallen in 
 with Martha." 
 
 "Why does she do it?" 
 
 "I don't know; but I've met several like her. 
 All people that are bad hke to think all other people 
 are bad. Well, Martha doesn't stop at thinking it; 
 she shows 'em the way and provides the men." 
 
 "In cold blood?" 
 
 "No; that wouldn't work, and she likes to play 
 the long game. That's her interest in life. She's 
 the chief figure in a little club she got up — a club 
 that calls itself bohemian — and it's there that she 
 generally operates. Then she'll take up young girls, 
 mostly from out of town — girls that are studying at 
 the Institute, or working and living by themselves, 
 and lonesome girls and dissatisfied girls — and she'll 
 be a real friend to them for just so long, and, before 
 they know it, they're on their way." 
 
 "Hasn't she any regrets?" 
 
 Eward laughed — a short, ugly laugh. 
 
 "You don't know Martha," he answered: "she 
 says they're free agents." 
 
 " But surely " 
 
 " Oh, sometimes something happens to upset her 
 a bit. Something happened this afternoon. That's 
 why she's early lighting up to-day. She generally 
 doesn't light up very much before five-thirty." 
 
 We were seated at a cafe table now. He leaned 
 back and put a match to his cigar. 
 
 " I'll tell you how it was," he said. " I got it 
 straight from her." 
 
144 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " Do you think you ought to tell me ? " 
 
 Eward flushed quickly. 
 
 " I think," he said, " that the whole world ought 
 to know. Just you listen for five minutes and see if 
 you don't agree with me. Mind you, Martha's only 
 one of a type." 
 
 He blew a long ring of blue smoke. 
 
 " Out in Cleveland," he began, " there was a little 
 girl named Mervin — Dolly Mervin. She was good to 
 look at and pleasant to talk to, but she wasn't a howl- 
 ing beauty and she wasn't a genius — just a nice, good 
 sort of girl. 
 
 " As I see it, the fault of the thing was Martha 
 and nobody else. Nothing would have gone wrong if 
 it hadn't been for Martha. Still, Dolly's parents, as 
 I happen to know, didn't altogether understand their 
 daughter, and I dare say they made home anything 
 but hvely. They'd married late in life and they'd 
 forgotten their own childhood. Then, too, they 
 hadn't any children but Dolly, so she didn't get the 
 benefit of their experience with an elder brother or 
 sister and she didn't have any brother or sister for 
 company. 
 
 " Fact is, she didn't have any company at all. 
 Her parents couldn't see why she needed any. They 
 were home every night; they considered each other 
 good company, and, of course, they thought that 
 Dolly ought to concur in their opinion. You know 
 the sort of a household It was; the land's full 
 of 'ehi. 
 
 " I don't mean that Dolly didn't have friends at 
 the public school, or that she didn't once in a while go 
 out to a friend's house. She did; but she didn't go 
 
THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 145 
 
 anything like as much as she should have gone, and 
 she hated to be under social obhgations, because her 
 own home was kept so quiet that she wasn't allowed 
 to repay 'em. So most of the time she just stopped 
 indoors and practiced on the piano. 
 
 " That sort of thing went on till she had graduated 
 from the high school. She hadn't been a brilliant 
 student, so she was nineteen years old at that time, 
 and I give you my word that she was absolutely ig- 
 norant of at least half of the fundamental facts of 
 her own make-up. What she did have in place of any 
 such knowledge was a tremendous desire to get out of 
 the life she had been leading, to see real life, to go 
 about, to be like other people and to be among 
 them. 
 
 " That and her piano. She showed a real talent 
 for music. She loved music and wanted to make it 
 her profession. I don't know enough about such 
 things to say for sure whether she'd have made a con- 
 cert soloist of herself or only a piano teacher; but I 
 remember that one of the big guns in the Pittsburgh 
 Orchestra told me that she'd have a fine chance if she 
 could only get proper instruction. Anyhow, music 
 was her chance, and she worked it until her father 
 agreed to send her here to study and told her that if 
 she did well he'd try to raise enough cash to give her 
 a course in Europe. 
 
 " Well, Dolly came to Pittsburgh and worked 
 hard, and because she'd never had an opportunity to 
 learn how to make friends, the first part of her stay 
 here was even more lonely than those nineteen years 
 in Cleveland had been. She just ate her heart out 
 until she met a fellow-student that had recently been 
 
146 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 taken up by Mrs. Dominic — by Martha — and so 
 Martha took up Dolly. 
 
 " It was Martha's old game. Martha had Dolly 
 to tea at her little home — eminently respectable, you 
 know, with a few casual references to some swells 
 that Martha always pretends are intimate acquaint- 
 ances of hers, and with a light word or two about one 
 young man or another — myself, most likely, among 
 them — and theater-parties and excursions and gay 
 dinners. Precisely enough to make Dolly's eyes 
 sparkle and to whet her appetite. 
 
 " That sort of thing was kept up for a while, and 
 then the Dominies had Dolly to their ' bohemian ' 
 club. Of course it wasn't bohemian. The essence of 
 bohemianism is unconsciousness; the minute you try 
 to become a bohemian, you cease to be one — you be- 
 come something else that I won't name — and the 
 Dominies always tried hard. But Dolly didn't know 
 this. She didn't know that the soup was poor, the 
 lobster a cold-storage crustacean, the lamb aged mut- 
 ton, and the claret vinegar. All she knew was that 
 there were lots of lights and lots of people and that 
 the lights were bright and that all the people seemed 
 happy and kindly. 
 
 " ' Let's have a cocktail,' said Martha, as they 
 sat down. ' I'm nearly dead for one.' 
 
 " ' I don't think I care for any,' said Dolly. 
 
 "'Why not?' 
 
 Well, you see, father never approved of drink- 
 ing.' 
 
 Martha raised her eyebrows in that way she has 
 of showing incredible scorn. 
 
 "'So you've never tasted a cocktail?' 
 
THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 147 
 
 " ' No.' 
 
 " ' Te-he ! ' laughed Martha. ' What do you think 
 of that, Eddie?' 
 
 " And poor, dough-faced Eddie said, ' Ho-ho ! ' — 
 as he was expected to do. 
 
 " ' It's nonsense ! ' said Martha. ' It might be all 
 right while you're a little girl at home; but here we're 
 all grown up and bohemian. Don't you think you're 
 old enough to take care of yourself? ' 
 
 " So Dolly took the cocktail. She took some of 
 the red vinegar, too, and pretty soon her shyness fell 
 from her, and she was as gay as any of the 
 others, and some of Martha's tired-eyed young boy 
 friends were attentive, and Dolly had a splendid 
 time. 
 
 " On her next visit to the club, Martha offered 
 her a cigarette, but Dolly hesitated. 
 
 " ' Now, don't be a goose, dear,' said Martha. 
 * The cocktail and the claret didn't hurt you, did 
 they?' 
 
 " ' No-o-o,' admitted Dolly. 
 
 " ' Well, then, a cigarette certainly won't. Why 
 shouldn't you smoke ? Where's the harm in It? We 
 all smoke. Women all smoke nowadays.' 
 
 " You see the process. The trouble with Dolly 
 was that she didn't see it. Martha just shoved her 
 gently along, week by week, enjoying the game, while 
 Dolly was always thinking that she was seeing life 
 at last and that Mrs. Dominic was ' simply lovely ' 
 to her. 
 
 " When Martha judged that the time was ripe, she 
 got Eddie to propose a trip. It was a great Idea I 
 They would organize a little party, run across th? 
 
148 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 state to Philadelphia on Friday night and go down 
 to Atlantic City for Saturday and Sunday. 
 
 "'Won't it cost a great deal?' faltered Dolly. 
 
 " ' Yes, it would cost a little bit of money.' 
 
 " ' Then I'm afraid I can't go,' said Dolly, who 
 had always wanted to see the ocean. 
 
 " Martha considered. 
 
 " ' Have you enough for carfare ? ' she asked. 
 
 " ' I've saved a little of my allowance. I think 
 I have enough for that.' 
 
 " ' Well, then, we'll attend to the hotel expenses. 
 I tell you what we'll do, Eddie. We'll get Willis 
 Sadler to be the host. He gave us a party down there 
 last year. He's got lots of money and he always 
 wants a good time. Besides, he's in Harrisburg now.' 
 
 " They arranged it that way. Sadler, whom Dolly 
 had never seen before, but who seemed to be very 
 intimate with Martha, met them on the way. He 
 wired to a big hotel for rooms, and they all had a 
 long dinner in Atlantic City along the ocean front, 
 with cocktails and champagne — and highballs to fol- 
 low. Then, somehow, Sadler and Dolly lost the 
 Dominies in the crowd on the board-walk, and, when 
 they got to the hotel, the girl, in a placid haze, found 
 that Martha and Eddie had been given rooms on the 
 other side of the house and that Sadler's room com- 
 municated with hers. 
 
 " That started things. The girl considered herself 
 lost; her whole training of silence was of the kind 
 that implicitly teaches that, once the great step is 
 taken, there is no means of turning back. She 
 went ahead. At last the music conservatory got on 
 to it and fired her. Meantime, Martha had had 
 
THE WOMAN THAT IS BOHEMIAN 149 
 
 enough of her company. Dolly was afraid to go 
 home — so she went to the dogs." 
 
 Eward stopped in his story. He threw away the 
 butt of his cigar. 
 
 "Is that all?" I asked. 
 
 " Not quite," he said. " You saw how Martha 
 was tanking up this afternoon? Well, she's afraid 
 that Eddie's cousin's political pull may not be strong 
 enough." 
 
 " I don't follow you." 
 
 " Eddie has a cousin in politics here." 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " Well, this afternoon a house was pinched, and 
 Dolly was among the Inmates." 
 
 "She's locked up?" 
 
 " Sure she is." 
 
 " And Martha's depending on Eddie's cousin to get 
 her out?" 
 
 " Not much I Martha'd like her to stay there for- 
 ever. You see, there was a preliminary hearing, and 
 Dolly opened up and told the whole story of how she 
 started wrong — and the names of the people that 
 started her. What's making Martha sick Is the dan- 
 ger of publicity. She's got Eddie's cousin on the 
 job of using his political pull to keep the papers 
 quiet." 
 
 "Can he do it?" 
 
 Eward looked at his watch. 
 
 " I don't know," he said. "' Of course that talk 
 
 about Martha having a tea-engagement was bluff. 
 
 She's at her home, and she made me promise to call 
 
 her up at six, so's she could tell me if there was any 
 
ISO THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 news. It's a quarter after now. She'll raise Cain be- 
 cause I'm late — she always does." 
 
 He went to a telephone-booth. In a few minutes 
 he returned, smiling bitterly. 
 
 " It's all right," he said. 
 
 "The papers will keep quiet?" 
 
 " Yes, more's the pity." 
 
 " So Martha's had another escape? " 
 
 "She has; and she's as happy as a lark." 
 
 " And what about Dolly " 
 
 " Oh — Dolly hanged herself in her cell a half-hour 
 ago." 
 
XIII 
 
 THE GIRL THAT KILLED 
 
 THE warden looked up from his desk. 
 " What prisoner do you want to see? " he 
 asked. 
 " Bertha Dixon," I answered. 
 "Why?" 
 
 " She sent for me." 
 " You'll need an order." 
 I produced my order. 
 
 The warden read it with puckered brows. He ap- 
 peared for the moment to suspect me of forgery. 
 " This seems correct," he said. 
 " I have every reason to believe the district at- 
 torney was quite sane when he gave it me." 
 
 " All right. Only it's very unusual — very unusual, 
 indeed." He pressed a button. A turnkey entered. 
 " Take this man up to see J 709," said the warden. 
 
 We climbed the iron stairs. We turned down one 
 corridor and up another — a maze, as it seemed to me, 
 of straight, long corridors — our feet ringing on the 
 iron flags. Except for that noise, the place was as 
 quiet as a tomb. It was as white as a tomb, too. 
 But it was oppressive with the sense of crowded dumb 
 life. 
 
 We went along more corridors — more stairs^-more 
 corridors. We passed cell after cell — row upon row 
 of cells. The prison, from the outside, had appeared 
 so small; now I thought there was no limit to it. 
 
 151 
 
152 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 At last one corridor ended abruptly in a studded 
 portal. This the turnkey unlocked and opened. He 
 thrust in his head. 
 
 " It's all right, Charley," he said. " Gentleman 
 with an order to see J 709." 
 
 He pushed me ahead of him and clanged the door 
 behind me. The bolts shot into place with a great, 
 metallic clash. I was in another corridor, with cells 
 on one side only. Two more turnkeys were seated 
 at a table, playing cards, just in front of one of the 
 cells. Ahead of me was another door — a small, 
 rather inoffensive-looking door. I knew now where I 
 was. That other door led to the electric chair; the 
 two turnkeys were the death watch; I was in the 
 condemned cells. 
 
 J 709 was under sentence of death. She sat on the 
 iron bed in her narrow, whitewashed cell. Her 
 hands were clasped in the folds of her black dress, 
 on her lap. She had beautiful hands. I have never 
 seen hands more beautiful. They were narrow, long, 
 and very white. The nails were pink and naturally 
 almond-shaped. From the wrist to the end of the 
 middle finger the lines were perfect. There was the 
 faint tracery of blue veins on the backs of the hands. 
 They had an appearance of extreme delicacy, and yet 
 — I can think of no other way to put it — they gave 
 you, also, the impression of great strength. 
 
 Bertha Dixon's figure was straight and slim and 
 supple. She had, even in her frequent gestures, a 
 grace of movement that was like music : it was spon- 
 taneous mathematics. Her face was oval and, with 
 the prison pallor on it, spiritual. She had a calm, 
 broad forehead, and level, steady, understanding, and 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED 153 
 
 forgiving gray eyes. She had always-strangely re- 
 minded me of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. She reminded 
 me more than ever of it now. This was the woman 
 that, on the morrow, was going to die. 
 
 " You sent for me? " I said awkwardly. I did not 
 know what to say. " It was kind of you to think of 
 me. 
 
 I don't know what I meant by that last sentence; 
 but I recall saying it, and then standing there, help- 
 less, before her. 
 
 " Yes," she said quite calmly. " I wanted to see 
 you. I wanted to talk to you. Don't call it kind of 
 me to send for you. It was kind of you, rather, to 
 have come. Won't you sit down?" 
 
 She motioned toward the single chair in her cell, 
 with the air of a woman that receives a caller in her 
 drawing-room. I sat down. 
 
 " Well," she said — it was quite as if she were dis- 
 cussing an abstract problem — " it is nearly finished." 
 
 I was possessed of a devil that bade me give her 
 lying comfort. 
 
 " Don't say that," I platitudinously faltered. 
 " While there's life there's hope. Perhaps the Gov- 
 ernor " 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 " Oh, no," she said. " I hope not. I sincerely 
 hope not. Indeed, I'm quite sure there isn't a chance 
 in the world. And I don't want that chance." 
 
 " You don't mean that you want " 
 
 I couldn't finish the sentence, but she finished it 
 for me. 
 
154 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " To die? " said she. " Why not? My life was 
 broken at its beginning. Somebody broke it. Then 
 I delivered the final blow myself. Anything more 
 would be anti-climax. I have filled all the space that 
 was assigned me. I have completed things. I don't 
 want to be a patched vase." 
 
 " Don't speak so ! " I pleaded. 
 
 "Why not? It is the truth, and surely if one is 
 ever to tell the truth, this is one of the rare occasions. 
 You wonder why I sent for you, don't you? " 
 
 " If there is anything that I can do — anything — I 
 sha'n't wonder for an instant." 
 
 "You can listen. Thank you; but you can only 
 listen. After all, that is a good deal. When one 
 reaches the moment that I have reached, a good lis- 
 tener is one's best friend. You asked me, that night 
 at Sharkey's, to tell you my story. I wouldn't. 
 The time wasn't ripe. But now it is. I've waited; 
 I've remembered. Now the time is ripe — and so I 
 have sent for you. You put me in your debt — deeply 
 in your debt — by coming. Listen." 
 
 This is what she told me — the girl that was going 
 to die: 
 
 " I was born into what is called a good family. I 
 believe they all say that — all the women that are 
 what I am; but as I am to go out of the world to- 
 morrow, there is really no reason for me to lie as to 
 the manner of my coming into it. My father had 
 some money and a great deal of family pride. He 
 was a banker in a rather large town in Maryland, and 
 suntil I was nineteen I was what is called well edu- 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED 155 
 
 cated. I was brought up to everything I wanted. 
 I was expected by my father to be the best dressed 
 girl in the place. When riding was the fashion, I 
 had the finest pony; when motors came in, he bought 
 me my own runabout. I didn't have to ask for 
 things; I had only to say that I liked them, and they 
 were bought for me. It was impressed on me — not 
 by words, perhaps, but certainly by the far more 
 effective method of example — that all this was as it 
 should be; that it was almost a part of the Divine 
 plan that my people had always been the people of 
 our town and should always so remain. 
 
 " Then, quite without warning — father never 
 talked of business with the family, and even now I 
 have no idea how it all happened — came the smash. 
 So far as ever I could make out, father woke up one 
 morning as well-to-do as ever, and went to bed that 
 night — If he did go to bed, poor dear! — a ruined 
 man. Immediately everything changed. Perhaps I 
 had better say that everything went. The horses 
 went, the carriages, the two motors, the house, joy, 
 contentment — they seemed to me to all go together. 
 Everything but pride. Somehow, father, who hated 
 farming, retained a little farm — it was probably 
 mortgaged — on the outskirts of the town. We went 
 there to live. At any rate, we went there to remain 
 alive. 
 
 " But we took our pride along. Our pride ap- 
 peared to grow in inverse ratio as everything else 
 shrank. We were still the Well, Dixon natu- 
 rally isn't my real name, but we'll call it that. We 
 were still The Dixons. Mother had become a nerv- 
 ous invalid from the shock. Father, since he couldn't 
 
156 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 show himself ' properly ' — that was his way of put- 
 ting it — would scarcely ever leave the farm. He 
 soon made it clear that, for a similar reason, he 
 didn't want me, his nineteen-year-old daughter, to 
 leave it either. 
 
 "There were dances; but I wasn't allowed to go 
 to them, because I couldn't go ' properly.' There 
 were picnics; but I had to stay at home, because I 
 couldn't go in the clothes that I could once have gone 
 in. Because we could no longer afford to subscribe 
 to the tennis club, I mustn't put myself under obli- 
 gations to my Inferiors by accepting their invitations 
 to play there. I mustn't accept any invitations, in- 
 deed, because I was in no position to return hospital- 
 ity. Visitors weren't welcome at the farm; we did 
 not want our poverty spied upon. 
 
 " All this, remember, happened to a girl that had 
 been sent to expensive schools and taught to cultivate 
 expensive tastes. Don't think that I am blaming my 
 father. I am blaming nothing but the state of af- 
 fairs that made him possible — and me. I always 
 loved my father, even when I couldn't sympathize 
 with his point of view; and as for all other personal 
 animosities, I ended them with the act that brought 
 mc — here. 
 
 " I had been engaged to be married. I had even 
 been in love with my fiance. We were both young, 
 but my father had approved, because the man in the 
 case, though poor, came of a family that was almost 
 as good — oh, not quite, of course ! that was impos- 
 sible ! but almost as good — as ours. When the crash 
 came, the first thing I thought about wa's Jack. I 
 thought he would come and console me. But he 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED 157 
 
 didn't. He didn't put in an appearance for two weeks 
 and more — not until we had established ourselves and 
 the new order of things at the farm. 
 
 " ' He'll not come at all,' said my father. 
 
 " I almost cried. 
 
 " ' He will come ! ' I said. ' Don't be so unjust to 
 him ! He doesn't like to trespass on our sorrow.' 
 
 " ' He doesn't want to share our poverty,' my 
 father corrected. 
 
 " But I was angry now. 
 
 " ' You don't know him,' I said. ' I do. Just you 
 wait.' 
 
 " So we waited — for two weeks. 
 
 " Then Jack appeared. 
 
 " The minute I saw him I knew that father had 
 been right. 
 
 " Jack talked all around the subject, but he came 
 to it at last. He pointed out that he had nothing but 
 his salary in the other bank — the only remaining bank 
 in the town; that this was not enough to support us 
 both in the manner in which our positions demanded 
 that we should be supported; that we had both gone 
 into our engagement on an hypothesis that had been 
 shattered, and that, in short, we were at the end of it. 
 
 " I blamed him then, but I don't now. Now I see 
 that he was only telling a hard truth. If we had 
 married on his prospects, we should both have been 
 wretchedly unhappy. As it was, he married the 
 daughter of a newer but more prosperous family, 
 and only one of us was unhappy. Jack was right. 
 I went through the period of rebellion and sank into 
 the period of solitary despair. 
 
 " Then George put in an appearance. He was 
 
158 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 the son of one of the town's minor merchants, and so 
 he hadn't moved very much in what we used to call 
 Our Set. Besides, he was nearly thirty years old. But 
 now everything was topsy-turvy with me. When he 
 met me one day in a lane near the farm and was just 
 as respectful as he had ever been — when he treated 
 me as I had begun to forget I could be treated — I 
 came slowly to like him. 
 
 " We met often. I didn't tell father about it, 
 because father would have said that George was 
 beneath me; but I came to care more and more for 
 George. I knew that people used to say that George 
 didn't have a very good reputation, but I judged 
 him — if I really could be said to judge him at all — 
 only by what I saw. In the end he made love to me, 
 and I was so utterly desolate and lonely and so hun- 
 gry for all the happiness I had been used to that I 
 thought I loved him. 
 
 " Father found it out. He found it out, through 
 the gossip of some farmhand, on the afternoon of a 
 day on the evening of which I had one of my usual 
 appointments to meet George. There was an awful 
 scene. Father accused me of the lowest sort of things 
 — things that I had hardly known ever existed — and 
 I went to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep. 
 But that night I stole out of the farmhouse and kept 
 my appointment. I told George everything — every- 
 thing. 
 
 " He comforted me. He said he loved me better 
 than anything else in the world. Of course, he said, 
 he had no decent income and marriage looked very 
 dim and distant; but, after all, we were engaged. 
 We had been judged guilty (without a fair trial )^ 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED 159 
 
 of what hadn't so much as entered our heads — and all 
 the time (so George put it) we were just as good as 
 married. 
 
 " I see now that what happened was what, given 
 the circumstances, was simply inevitable. But the re- 
 sult! I needn't tell you what I went through when 
 at last I came to guess it — the doubts and fears and 
 shame. There was a terrible meeting with George — 
 terrible ! I had been hanging over the edge of a 
 precipice for weeks and weeks, and the only thing 
 I had to cling to was my faith in George. 
 
 " ' I don't believe I'm responsible for it,' said 
 George. ' It's some other fellow.' 
 
 " I think I nearly fainted. I don't know what I 
 began by saying. I remember all sorts of anger and 
 tears, protestations and accusations. But I know 
 that, at last, I said I should go straight home, write 
 a letter to father telling him about George, and then 
 jump into the pond. I meant It, too. 
 
 " I suppose that scared him. I don't know. 
 
 " ' Look here ! ' he said. ' You must see that we 
 can't get married; we'd have nothing to live on.' 
 
 " I remembered Jack. I said I supposed George 
 was correct. 
 
 " ' So that what you want,' said George, ' is to be 
 saved from any disgrace.' 
 
 " Somehow or other he got me to agree with him. 
 He said he knew a doctor in Baltimore. It may have 
 been a doctor. I never knew for sure. He said the 
 thing was perfectly simple. 
 
 " Of course I was crazy. I was mad with mental 
 agony. I honestly have only the most fragmentary 
 recollections of that trip to Baltimore and my return 
 
i6o THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 to the farm. I know now that hundreds of women 
 die every year from such things; I only knew then 
 that the day after I got back to the farm I began to 
 undergo tortures that were beyond anything I had 
 thought the human body could survive and that left 
 me a physical wreck for the rest of my life. 
 
 " I wanted to die. I prayed to die. But I didn't 
 die. I got well. And, the day that I left my 
 room, I found out that father knew what had 
 happened. 
 
 " I said I was crazy before. If I was, the form 
 of my mania changed now. I called up George on 
 the telephone — he hadn't so much as telephoned to 
 find out how I was getting on the whole time I'd 
 been ill — and I told him I wanted to see him. I 
 could tell by his voice that he had detected in mine 
 something that frightened him. 
 
 " ' I'm too busy,' he said. ' Wait till to-night. 
 Wait till some other time.' 
 
 " ' Not a minute,' I said. ' I want to see you now.' 
 
 " I went upstairs — tottering — to get my hat. As 
 I came down, my mother was at the door of her 
 room. 
 
 " ' Where are you going? ' she asked. 
 
 " ' I'm going to see George Livsey,' I told her. 
 
 " She flung up her hands. I'll never forget her 
 face. 
 
 " ' Then it's true ! ' she said. ' Your father 
 wouldn't tell me — but it's tine ! ' 
 
 " She dropped over in a faint. I telephoned for 
 the doctor, and as soon as he came he said it was 
 serious. 
 
 (I I 
 
 Heart disease,' he said 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED i6i 
 
 " But when we had made mother comfortable and 
 the nurse had come, I went to see George. 
 
 " ' I am nineteen years old,' I said, ' and you are 
 thirty. You have ruined my life. Unless we are 
 married — I know you don't care for me, but you can 
 be honest and stick to your bargain— you can be a 
 man if you try. I know I don't care for you, but 
 you can make me care for you if you'll be straight 
 with me, and you'll never have any cause to complain 
 of me, anyhow.' 
 
 " 'And what do you want? ' he asked. 
 " ' I want you to marry me,' I answered. 
 " He started to smile. 
 
 " ' Don't laugh! ' I warned him. ' I want to save 
 my mother's life and my father's brain and my own 
 reputation.' 
 
 " ' You haven't any reputation left,' he said. ' The 
 whole town knows what was the matter with you.' 
 
 " ' The whole town,' I said, ' is the sort of a 
 town that believes reputations can be repaired by 
 marriage.' 
 
 " ' We'd be too poor.' 
 
 " ' I'd be not much poorer than I am now, and I'd 
 help you all I could. We should make out some- 
 how.' 
 
 " He begged for a day in which to think it over. 
 " * You may have it,' I told him; ' but if you kill 
 my mother and father and don't try to make up for 
 what you have done, I'll — I'll kill you, George.' 
 " I remember I said it very quietly. 
 " That night my mother died and the next morn- 
 ing my father shot himself. When it was over and I 
 had a little time to think, I tried to find George. He 
 
1 62 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 had left town. They thought he had gone to New 
 York. At any rate, he had run away. 
 
 " Well, I came to New York, too. The creditors 
 got the farm ; the insurance had all gone in loans and 
 things; there was practically nothing left for me. I 
 was almost penniless; even if I had wanted to stay 
 in our town, it would have been about impossible 
 for me to do so, because the gossips had guessed at 
 the truth about me, and where I wasn't an object of 
 the scorn that is either pitying or horrified, I was the 
 object of that kind of scorn which prompts a common 
 type of male animal to offer an insulting companion- 
 ship. So, I say, I went to New York with just a 
 few dollars between me and nothing. 
 
 " I had found out from some of George's friends 
 about where he was. He had a place as clerk in a 
 Broadway haberdasher's shop. I think I was quite 
 mad. Anyhow, I went to the shop to see him. He 
 was sorting a lot of neckties when I came in, and he 
 nearly dropped them when he saw me. I dare say 
 that by this time I looked like a ghost. 
 
 " I said, ' Good-morning, George.' 
 
 " He got quite white. 
 
 " ' Keep your voice down,' he said. ' Somebody'll 
 hear you. Do you want me to lose my job ? What 
 do you mean by following me to New York? What 
 do you mean by coming to my place of business? ' 
 
 What did you mean,' I asked, ' by running 
 away ? ' 
 
 " I repeated to him what I had said at our last 
 meeting. He absolutely discarded me. He said I 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED 163 
 
 had been a bad woman before ever he knew me 
 well — he knew that was a lie — and he literally or- 
 dered me into the street. I must have spoken loudly. 
 I don't know. Anyhow, the proprietor of the shop 
 came up, and as I went out I heard George telling 
 his employer that I was a low woman that he had 
 met at a Fourteenth Street cafe and that I had been 
 trying to extort money from him. 
 
 " Although this was the last insult, it also gave 
 me an idea. I had nearly tried to kill George in that 
 shop, but I hadn't the courage — or what I then called 
 courage. Now the thing that he had said to his 
 employer suggested how I could keep from starving 
 — if I decided not to starve — and how, in any event, 
 I could hide my identity. I came back to the neigh- 
 borhood of the shop that afternoon, and when 
 George quit work I followed him — he didn't see 
 me — to find out where he lived. I found that he had 
 rooms in a boarding-house on East Thirty-second 
 Street. 
 
 " Oh, yes, I must have been mad. I went down to 
 Fourteenth Street that evening. I took a little room 
 in a house that one of the girls I met told me about. 
 I really tried to be a bad woman — really tried — and 
 I couldn't do it. I just couldn't bring myself to it. 
 
 " Well, then, I said that there was only the one 
 thing left. Of course I know that almost any killing 
 is wrong — now. Of course I know that it Is usually 
 worse than wrong; that it Is useless. George is dead 
 now, but what have I gained? Revenge? He was 
 $ure to have suffered more if I had let him live out 
 
1 64 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 his own destiny. Did I save other girls from him? 
 Not enough to count while there are so many men 
 hke him. I don't regret what is going to happen to 
 me, but the whole thing seems such a waste. Have 
 I brought my father and mother back to life? If I 
 had escaped — and you know I didn't try to escape — 
 would I have been any better off because I had killed 
 George? That's what I see now. But then I saw 
 nothing except what he had done to me. 
 
 " That and one thing more. I saw that, after what 
 he had said to his employer about me, and after I 
 had been seen In a couple of the Fourteenth Street 
 cafes, people would believe It was just a low murder 
 by a low woman and my real name would never have 
 to appear. As things turned out, I was right. 
 
 " So I waited for George. I waited several days. 
 I waited till my money was all but gone. Then I 
 remembered that I hadn't a weapon. I hadn't enough 
 left for a good revolver, and, anyhow, I wanted no 
 mistakes, so I bought a knife. I am not a good shot. 
 I know so little about revolvers. i 
 
 " At last, one night, I saw him come out of his 
 boarding-house. I stopped him at the corner. 
 
 "'You again?' he said. 'If you don't let me 
 alone, I'll have you pinched for soliciting me on the 
 street.' 
 
 I'm hungry,' I told him. ' I want you to buy 
 me a dinner.' 
 
 " He laughed at that. 
 
 You wanted a good deal more the last time I 
 saw you,' he said. ' Now you're getting more sen- 
 sible.' 
 
 " I knew what he thought, but I didn't answer. 
 
THE GIRL THAT KILLED 165 
 
 We hailed a closed taxicab, and, though there was 
 snow on the ground, I asked him to give me a 
 ride through Central Park before we ate anything. 
 He agreed. By the time we had got to the upper end 
 of the park and turned back, it was dark and the 
 lamps along the roads weren't sufficient to light the 
 inside of the taxi. 
 
 " ' George,' I said, ' I want to give you one more 
 chance.' 
 
 " He swore at me. 
 
 " 'Are you going to begin that?' he asked. 
 
 " I was going to begin it. If necessary, I was 
 going to end it, too. We went all over it. I argued; 
 he stormed. At the end, he told me once and for 
 all that he was done with me. He said he would 
 have me arrested if I ever spoke to him again. He 
 said he was going to stop the taxi and get out. And 
 then he struck me across the face. 
 
 " I drew the knife. 
 
 " He never knew what I was doing. He never 
 knew what happened to him. 
 
 " I struck hard — once, twice — ever so many times. 
 He merely gurgled and slumped back in the seat. 
 The taxi kept whirring on through the park. I 
 struck and kept on striking till I was exhausted. My 
 hand ached with the strain. So did my arm. I 
 stopped. My hand was wet. 
 
 " I stopped the taxi. 
 
 " ' Drive to the nearest police station,' I said. * I 
 have just killed this man.' " 
 
XIV 
 
 THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 
 
 WE had been talking it over, my friend and I, 
 late into the night. As my friend is what 
 is called a " man of the world," it was cer- 
 tain that sooner or later he would say: 
 
 " Oh, the trouble with you is that you're neglect- 
 ing one entire side of the problem ! Of course it's 
 terrible that either physical force or material circum- 
 stances should drive women into such a business, and 
 that the women so driven should be the prey of 
 hideous illnesses and should spread those illnesses; 
 but I know enough to be sure of one thing, and that 
 is that some women go wrong because they deliber- 
 ately prefer to go wrong." 
 
 When he said that, I answered: 
 
 " About one in a thousand." 
 
 "So few?" 
 
 " Of their own uninfluenced choice — yes. The 
 statistics prove it; but even if the statistics didn't 
 prove it, I have too good an opinion of womanhood 
 to set the figure higher." 
 
 " All right, say one in a thousand. Why leave 
 them out of your calculations? Of the sort that 
 go wrong because they want to go wrong, some, so 
 far as money-making is concerned, must make a 
 success of their lives." 
 
 " So far as money-making is concerned, there are 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 167 
 
 some girls, even among those forced into the business 
 by circumstances, that make what you call a success." 
 
 " How many? " 
 
 " Say one in four thousand five hundred." 
 
 "Why not more?" 
 
 " Because the overwhelming majority have to turn 
 over their earnings to the man or woman that owns 
 them; because, for the rest, the necessary expenses 
 of the business exceed its income; because the life cul- 
 tivates habits that drain the purse, that drain the 
 health; because ninety-odd per cent, are mathematic- 
 ally sure to contract one of the maladies of their 
 profession; because the average length of existence 
 in their business is just about five years." 
 
 " Still," my friend persisted, " there is your one 
 in four thousand five hundred." 
 
 " Yes," I said, " there she is. In fact, I knew a 
 woman that went wrong by what she thought was her 
 free choice, and she made money and saved it." 
 
 " I should like to hear about her," said my friend. 
 
 " Very well," said I; and I told him the story of 
 somebody that I shall here call Penelope Burgess. 
 
 Pen — in those days, six years ago, it was the smart 
 thing to be able to address her by an abbreviation — 
 came, so far as any of us could learn, of an un- 
 tainted stock. Hers was a New England family — 
 New England of the sort that has settled in Minne- 
 apolis and is unfriendly to St. Paul. I suppose that, 
 indirectly, you could find economic influences at work 
 upon her, as you can find them in all cases; but I 
 am regarding, just now, only primary influences. 
 Anyhow, her father was by no means badly off, her 
 home life was pleasant, and Pen was sent to what 
 
1 68 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 everybody considered a good school. Yet, without 
 any reason that appeared on the surface — indeed, for 
 no other reason, she always declared, save that she 
 " felt like it " — the girl ran away and went on the 
 stage. 
 
 Like most young girls that run away to go on the 
 stage. Pen had no aptitude for the theater. She 
 did, however, have two attributes that, otherwise 
 employed, would have been admirable. Otherwise 
 employed. They were pluck and beauty; but this 
 girl used them in her own way. Her pluck kept her 
 from communicating with her family, so that if they 
 ever felt inclined to take her back, they never had 
 the chance; and her beauty — she was petite and 
 blonde; rather pretty, in fact, than beautiful, but very 
 pretty — her beauty, since men called it that, got 
 her a wide reputation under her stage-name, guar- 
 anteed her engagements, and secured her a little 
 army of male admirers. 
 
 So she found that talent was unnecessary. There 
 was no novitiate of barn-storming for Pen, none of 
 the agonies of one-night stands, never the trial of 
 being stranded in Parksburg or Youngstown. Pen 
 began her career as The Great Exception. She went 
 to Broadway, and, save for a few " two-week runs " 
 in Boston, Chicago, and perhaps even Philadelphia, 
 on Broadway she remained. If you were at college 
 in those days, and if I told you her name, you would 
 remember how you bought her photograph and put 
 it on your mantelpiece, and how you forged her sig- 
 nature upon it in order that your classmates might 
 think she gave it you. 
 
 Well, Pen became the vogue. Not a star, you 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 169 
 
 understand — even with a theater-going public such as 
 ours, some vocal quality, some modicum of dramatic 
 ability is required for that — but the vogue, neverthe- 
 less. The audiences saw that she was decorative, and 
 the managers saw that the audiences saw it. She ap- 
 peared upon the programmes of all the successful 
 musical comedies, and, though she was neither musical 
 nor a comedienne, she was distinctly a figure. She 
 also drew one — a somewhat more than comfortable 
 salary. 
 
 Now, when the average girl reaches such a posi- 
 tion on the stage, the average girl keeps it until she 
 marries somebody with more money than she can 
 earn ; but Pen was by no means — and that is the whole 
 point of my friend's contention — an average woman. 
 She had offers of marriage — a lot of them — and sev- 
 eral were financially flattering; but Pen said she was 
 her own mistress and preferred to remain so. She had 
 more offers of another sort, still more financially flat- 
 tering; but to these she also replied that she meant 
 to be her own mistress. And these things directly in- 
 creased her popularity, and so indirectly increased her 
 salary. Well-known dressmakers contended to give 
 her elaborate gowns, because they knew that the 
 women in her audiences would dress as she did and 
 where she did. One season she set the fashion with a 
 new coiffure. And the next somebody named a cigar 
 for her. This last secured her fame. 
 
 But for such a woman the New York restaurants 
 are an important factor — and such a woman is an 
 important factor for the New York restaurants. 
 They are interdependent. It is generally necessary 
 to the woman's special sort of popularity that she 
 
170 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 sup at elaborate cafes, and it is always necessary to 
 the popularity of the elaborate cafes that such women 
 appear there. 
 
 This is sober truth. Consider the river that is 
 Broadway. Consider its tributaries. Consider these 
 streams, the one great and the many scarcely smaller, 
 as they hiss and bubble, in the white night-lights, 
 through the theater district. Along those few miles 
 of curb, their shores are thicker sprinkled with play- 
 houses than are any two blocks of London's Shaftes- 
 bury Avenue — more playhouses, one would almost 
 say, than there are castles to be seen along the whole 
 length of the Rhine. Well, for each theater there 
 are half a dozen expensive restaurants, and on the 
 amount of money that it costs to run one restaurant 
 for one night your neighbor's family could live for 
 three years in its accustomed comfort. In this field 
 of industry the laws of competition still work well- 
 nigh unimpaired. Directed by them, the proprietors' 
 life staggers along the endless verge of bankruptcy. 
 It proceeds by two rules only: each place must have 
 more elaborate decorations, plate, food — if you care 
 to call it food — than the last, and each must secure 
 the patronage of the class that restaurateurs like to 
 look at while they eat. 
 
 It happened that, just as Pen's popularity reached 
 its zenith, the popularity of Mr. John Hewett showed 
 signs of an approaching eclipse. To return to our 
 preceding metaphor, his business was half-way over 
 the cliff of bankruptcy and sliding farther. 
 
 John Hewett was his real name. On the gilt 
 menus of his gilded restaurant he appeared as " Jean 
 Huette," and to the white-waistcoated young-old 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 171 
 
 men that signed their bills there (and did not pay 
 them) he was fondly known as " Jennie." He had 
 made a good thing of the dining-room in his wife's 
 boarding-house in West Forty-Something Street. 
 They had opened a " French table d'hote cafe " a 
 score of blocks northward and saved money; then, 
 left a widower and residuary legatee, John had, in 
 an evil moment, been lured into borrowing a small 
 fortune and moving his place of business into a newly 
 erected Doge's palace around the corner on Broad- 
 way. The race with destruction had begun immedi- 
 ately, and was now, it seemed, about to end. 
 
 " If I could only get the crowd! " he wailed to 
 his lawyer. 
 
 He was a frail little man, with a weak face and a 
 waxed mustache, and he had no end of confidence 
 in the legal bulldog that growled him occasional 
 advice at ten dollars per interview. 
 
 " That's easy," said the lawyer. " That Broad- 
 way crowd doesn't know any more about good food 
 than it knows about good wines. Change the label, 
 and they'll believe that St. Marcel is a dry cham- 
 pagne." 
 
 " I've tried that," faltered John. 
 
 " I know it — I've dined at your place. What I 
 mean is that this crowd doesn't want food or drink; 
 so long as the one is filling and the other alcoholic, 
 it doesn't care. It's just a flock of sheep that will go 
 anywhere its leaders go. What you want to do is 
 to capture a bellwether." 
 
 "Who?" asked Hewett. 
 
 " Might as well start with the big game. Try 
 Pen Burgess." 
 
172 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Hewett gasped. " Pen Burgess ? " 
 
 "Why not? She's got to go somewhere, hasn't 
 she?" 
 
 " But can I manage it? " 
 
 " I'll tell you," said the lawyer — and he did. 
 
 The next morning (theatrical time, i p.m.), little 
 Hewett found himself, after a forty-five-minute wait, 
 in the presence of Penelope Burgess, who wore a 
 morning-gown that looked like Queen Mary's coro- 
 nation robe. He poured out his woes to her. He 
 told her that she, and she alone, could save him. 
 Precisely as if his name were really Jean Huette, he 
 shed tears. 
 
 Pen was touched. She was nothing, at that time, 
 if not good-natured, and she was touched. 
 
 "Only how on earth can I help you?" she in- 
 quired. 
 
 " You can eat," sobbed Hewett. 
 
 " I do," said Pen. 
 
 " But at my place, at the Whitelight. You can 
 eat there — the food is not altogether bad, really — 
 and if you were only to make it your custom to come 
 there every night after the theater — and tell your 
 friends — and sit at a table that I shall reserve for 
 you, in the very center — and it should become known, 
 then others — then all the flock of them, I am sure, 
 
 would be sure " Hewett lost himself in the web 
 
 of his sentence and spread wide his wet, appealing 
 palms. "Don't you see?" he ended. 
 
 Pen smiled. After all, it was flattering. 
 
 "Yes," she said, "I see; but " 
 
 " I will pay you a regular price per meal," said 
 the eager proprietor. 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 173 
 
 Pen wouldn't hear of that, but she agreed to come 
 regularly to the Whitellght, and she kept her word. 
 Every night, surrounded by a changing court of ad- 
 mirers, she went there, and, as the scheme succeeded 
 and the crowd followed her, she got to like it. She 
 finished by liking it better than she liked the stage. 
 The admiration was more direct, it was more per- 
 sonal, it was closer at hand, and she was the star 
 performer. Besides, she could order, and did order, 
 whatever extravagance teased her fancy, and it cost 
 her nothing. She became extremely fond of palatable 
 extravagances, both solid and liquid. 
 
 The time came, of course, when the restaurant 
 interfered with the theater; so she gave up the 
 theater. She did It deliberately. She had become a 
 professional beauty, and she proposed to devote all 
 her attention to that. She would, she clearly saw, 
 have to depart from the ways that society considered 
 virtuous ; but it would pay better than the theater, if 
 properly managed, and she was sure that she would 
 prefer it. Therefore, as I have said, just about the 
 time that she had changed Hewett's fortunes for the 
 better, she changed her own. 
 
 Why? 
 
 I wish I could tell you — " for certain," as the 
 children say. As It is, all that I can tell you is what, 
 just about this time, she told me. I can add only that 
 she was always frank. 
 
 " I've done it because I like this life," she said. 
 " I like the admiration. I like the attention. I like 
 to come Into a big restaurant, all so full of lights 
 and clatter and hurrying waiters and well-dressed 
 men and women. And then, as I sail up the room, 
 
174 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 with a good-looking fellow or two in attendance, I 
 like to see the waiters drop their other work and 
 hurry to dear a way for me. I like to see the head- 
 waiter bowing and scraping to me and ordering half 
 a dozen assistants to rearrange the best table and 
 bring on more expensive flowers. I like to hear all 
 the careless clatter stop, to hear all those laughing, 
 well-dressed men and women become silent, and to 
 see them look at me. I like to hear them whisper: 
 ' There she is ! Isn't she splendid ? ' And I like to 
 pretend not to hear them and not to care." 
 
 " But," I recall suggesting, " you know that they 
 know — everything." 
 
 " I don't care if they do. What makes me proud 
 is that they have to admire, in spite of all they know 
 of me. I suppose it's got me, this life, just the way 
 that the opium-habit gets some other people." 
 
 There, it seems to me, she hit it. The excitement 
 of Broadway's night phase was food to her, and its 
 admiration was strong drink. The fact that she paid 
 for it with her sense of right and wrong, and the fact 
 that it necessitated other rich food and genuine strong 
 drink — these things she refused to reckon. 
 
 The price — it is a pity that she did not reckon 
 upon the price. For her slim prettiness, if for noth- 
 ing else, she was so well worth saving ! 
 
 I can see her yet as she was in 1905 — with the 
 figure of a young girl and the delicate, oval face of 
 a sensitive child. Those were her charms; the best 
 of dressmakers, the highest-priced of milliners could 
 but provide a frame — they could accentuate, but they 
 could not enhance, the lithe body, the gracious ease 
 of movement, the almost severely classic lines of chin 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 175 
 
 and lips and nose and the eyes that were big and 
 round and clear. 
 
 Well, she had her Ideal and she achieved it, be- 
 cause she was a free agent. Because she was no man's 
 slave, she became her own bondwoman. Because 
 she was deliberate, she could select her way and fol- 
 low it carefully. She was the Great Exception still. 
 She was the one woman in the thousands — the rare 
 variant that those who belittle all anti-slavery agita- 
 tion, sane or insane, forever harp upon. She con- 
 tracted none of the Ills peculiar to her business; she 
 made money, and she saved it. 
 
 Mark what happened. 
 
 This, though Pen and a great many people tnat 
 regard themselves as far better are slow to admit it, 
 remains a world wherein nobody has ever yet evolved 
 a means of getting something for nothing. " It was," 
 says Carlyle, " from of old said. The loser pays." 
 He does pay; but so, be forever sure, does also the 
 gainer. Not always directly; often indirectly; gen- 
 erally a bit at a time, and almost always in secret — 
 but he pays. For the term of our natural life the 
 body moral is bound to the physical body, and be- 
 tween them action and reaction are opposite and 
 equal. 
 
 Given all other immunity, in Pen's profession, as 
 in all professions, what you do must leave its mark. 
 The public woman that escapes perils by the way- 
 side goes straight on to the peril that is at the end 
 of the way.. Having beauty, her work requires that 
 she sacrifice it before its time; having youth, she 
 gives youth for her daily food. Her supply is 
 limited by the limits of the human constitution. 
 
176 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 What she gets is admiration and money; what she 
 gives to get these things is something that must ex- 
 haust itself before she has got all that she wants. It 
 is geometrical progression physically applied. 
 
 Remember, I repeat, that Pen succeeded. Remem- 
 ber that she put money aside. Remember that she 
 achieved just what she wanted, that she gained a pin- 
 nacle gained by but one in many thousands. And, as 
 I say, mark what happened. 
 
 What happened to Pen was that she grew fat. 
 Funny, isn't it? 
 But wait. 
 
 Pen never neglected her mirror. She passed, daily, 
 hours before it. She had to. And though, at last, 
 she began to be a little blind to some of the things 
 she saw there, she one day admitted that the beauti- 
 ful lines of her throat were growing less distinct ; she 
 was getting a double chin. 
 
 Pen weighed herself and found to her consterna- 
 tion that she was ominously overweight. 
 
 She went each noon to a Turkish bath, where she 
 was steamed among a score of other women, whose 
 appearance was repulsive to her, but who were there 
 on errands similar to her own. Yet her weight in- 
 creased. She passed her lonely hours with her chin 
 in a compress — to no good end. She sought a doctor. 
 " You must take exercise," said the doctor. 
 " I hate it 1 " cried Pen. 
 
 The doctor shrugged, and Pen exercised rigor- 
 ously. But she gained weight and so reported. 
 
 "Well," said the doctor, "we must go further. 
 No late hours. No rich food. Plenty of sleep of a 
 rational sort. And no wine." 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 177 
 
 Pen puckered her mouth — and her mouth was still 
 pretty. 
 
 " Why don't you tell me some easier way? " she 
 inquired. 
 
 " That is what everybody wants," answered the 
 doctor — " an easier way. But there is none." 
 
 It came, finally, to this: the life she loved had de- 
 manded all of her that made the life she loved love 
 her. Pen hesitated; but she had already made her 
 choice. " It's hke the opium-habit," she had said. 
 She did not want the thing that she would gain at 
 the price of the doctor's regimen. She wanted to 
 " go ahead " — and go ahead she did. 
 
 At first she did not notice the subtle changes, but 
 the changes were there. 
 
 There was a gradual shifting in the types of men 
 that courted her favors. These men were once of 
 middle life, rich, prominent, known, smart. Then 
 there came, in the place of the earlier suitors, callow 
 lads from college, who courted not Pen, but a repu- 
 tation for gilded wickedness by being seen with Pen; 
 who hid their ignorance of Broadway restaurants 
 under a loudness of manner, and who found a false 
 courage for false deeds and false vows in more cham- 
 pagne than was good for them. Several were dis- 
 missed from college because of her and one was 
 found in the East River. Yet they, too, fell away 
 and were followed by men with bulging waistcoats 
 and gray hair or no hair at all — men that aped youth 
 while their heavily veined hands trembled, men 
 that did not sugar-coat their talk. One of these, 
 who had a small job in a bank, was sent to Sing 
 Sing. 
 
178 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 These changes in her admirers were but the re- 
 flections of changes in Pen. Her face was no longer 
 the face of a sensitive child; it was no longer oval: 
 it was round. Her body was no longer that of a 
 young girl: it was what, by a strange twist of the 
 word, we call matronly. Her movements were 
 neither lithe nor gracious; they were always heavy 
 and sometimes clumsy, and the utmost pains of con- 
 stantly shifted dressmakers availed nothing. The 
 chin was now unmistakably double; the lips were a 
 little valley between the cheeks ; the nose was a nega- 
 tive quantity, and the eyes, when one at all noticed 
 them, were not clear. 
 
 The Broadway crowd responded — or, rather, 
 failed to respond. There was no stir of attention 
 when Pen entered a cafe. The women did not raise 
 their eyes from their escorts to study her clothes and 
 her figure. Nobody said: " There she is! " Nobody 
 said anything. And the waiters were less atten- 
 tive. 
 
 Pen had occasionally wavered in her fidelity to the 
 Whitelight, but now she renewed it, and, for a while, 
 Hewett, who possessed a certain small share of the 
 sense of gratitude, received her with a tempered 
 cordiality. You have understood that, when In the 
 first days she preferred to sup alone at the White- 
 light — as, by him, she sometimes did — there was no 
 charge; but among these latter evenings there came 
 one when she supped alone by force of circumstances, 
 and when she had finished, the head-waiter amazed 
 her by presenting a bill. 
 
 "What's this?" asked Pen, staring at the paper 
 as if she had never seen such a thing before. 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED 179 
 
 "The bill, madam." 
 
 Under her rouge, Pen went pale. 
 
 " You're new here, aren't you? " she demanded. 
 
 " Two years, madam." 
 
 " That accounts for it. Tell Mr. Hewett that 
 Miss Penelope Burgess wants to see him." 
 
 "Mr. Hewett, ma'am?" 
 
 " Well, M. Huette, then. It's the same thing." 
 
 Hewett came — still wax-mustached and fresh- 
 cheeked, but grown vastly important. 
 
 "See here, Hewett," said Pen; "this fresh guy 
 head-waiter of yours has given me a bill! " 
 
 Hewett blushed. He was apologetic. He tore up 
 the bill. 
 
 But he did not send for the head-waiter, and the 
 next time that Pen supped alone at the Whitelight 
 she got a bill again. 
 
 Then Hewett was outspoken. He was very sorry, 
 but it must be. He could no longer make exceptions ; 
 the business had grown 
 
 "Who started it growing for you?" asked Pen. 
 
 Oh, he knew that, did Hewett, and he was grate- 
 ful. But time had passed, and in the past he had 
 given enough suppers to Miss Burgess to repay all 
 her old kindnesses. 
 
 Pen laid down a yellow-backed bill. 
 
 " Keep the change, Jennie," she said, and swished 
 out of the place. 
 
 She was well-to-do; she had no fear of poverty; 
 but her love of the Broadway night-life had grown 
 with experience; the habit was part of her being, 
 and it was with a shock that she realized that the 
 evenings when there were no wooers, when she must 
 
i8o THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 perforce sup alone, were more and more frequent. 
 Still, sup in public she would, and, In order to show 
 Hewett that she could pay his highest prices, she chose 
 often the Whitelight. She was sure that those prices 
 were regularly raised for her especial benefit, but she 
 would not so much as " add up " the bill. Because 
 she was so lonely, she would sometimes, though not 
 often, grow a little drunk, and the other patrons 
 would smile. 
 
 Then, one evening, when — as was now a necessary 
 precaution — she had reserved her old table by tele- 
 phone, she entered In the wake of some much be- 
 cloaked young woman surrounded by a bevy of men 
 • — a woman that Pen did not recognize. She heard 
 the stir that she had so often heard In other days. 
 She saw the women raise their eyes, and the men 
 raise eyes of a different sort. She heard them say: 
 "There she is! Isn't she splendid?" There was 
 the familiar scurry of attendant waiters — and the 
 other woman, a mere chit of a girl, with the face of 
 a child and the slim figure of a graduate, was shown 
 to the place that had been Pen's. 
 
 Pen turned and encountered Hewett in the center 
 of the room. 
 
 " I reserved that table ! " she said. 
 
 She pointed, and she spoke loudly. People wheeled 
 In their chairs and grinned at the fun. 
 
 " Hush! " pleaded Hewett. " I'm sorry. There 
 was some mIx-up. You shall have this excellent table 
 over here." 
 
 He Indicated a shadowy corner. 
 
 " Not much I " cried Pen. " I'll have my own 1 
 Who's this that's got it? " 
 
THE WOMAN THAT SUCCEEDED igi 
 
 In low breaths Hewett told her. It was Cicely 
 Morton, the new professional beauty. Everybody 
 was wild about her. 
 
 Pen bit her lip. What she had long known could 
 no more be denied: other women had come and 
 gone, other women had become the talk of the town 
 ' — New York, that loves so intensely and so briefly, 
 had forgotten her. 
 
 She rebelled in the only way that she understood 
 rebellion. She swore at Hewett. The little pro- 
 prietor, seeing that a scene could not be avoided, 
 resolved to make this scene final. He told her that 
 she was a nuisance and that she was not again to 
 enter the Whitelight. Penelope seized a water- 
 bottle from the nearest table and hit him with it. She 
 was hustled into the street, disheveled, torn, haggard 
 — not pretty to look at. She was arrested and taken 
 to the Night Court. Hewett refused to press the 
 charge, but the newspapers printed funny stories. It 
 was all very humorous. 
 
 That was the end's beginning. Pen had long since 
 ceased to be Broadway's idol; she now became its 
 joke. The Big Street's population changes yearly, 
 and the newcomers knew not Penelope. What had 
 happened at the Whitelight repeated itself, with un- 
 essential variations, at many restaurants. Often, as 
 she walked the pavement of an afternoon, she heard 
 the younger women giggle at her; once, when she 
 filed out of a cafe with a decrepit man whose com- 
 panionship she had virtually hired, she heard a wife 
 say: 
 
 "Who's that awful old harridan?" 
 
 And the husband, who had once begged permis- 
 
1 82 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 slon to kiss Pen's hand, adjusted his glasses, scruti- 
 nized her, and responded: 
 
 "Bless me! I don't know. Fierce, isn't she?" 
 
 And Pen was still, in years, what most of us call 
 young. 
 
 So Pen, you see, succeeded. She was the Great 
 Exception that my friend had talked about and in- 
 sisted upon. She contracted none of the illnesses 
 peculiar to her profession. She saved money. She 
 has not paid one fraction more for her sort of life 
 than is, even in the case of the one woman in thou- 
 sands, absolutely, and by the greatest possible exer- 
 tion of human precaution, necessary. But the mini- 
 mum price even the Great Exception has to pay. 
 
 Music, mirth, human companionship — she can 
 have them, when at all, in return for nothing but dol- 
 lars and cents. What her beauty and her youth once 
 paid for she has now to pay for with the money that 
 her youth once earned. 
 
 She has rented, has Pen, an expensive apartment 
 in a Broadway hotel, where, when she hasn't the 
 courage to go out with a hired escort and be laughed 
 at in the places that once were shrines in her honor, 
 she can lean from the window and see the lamps and 
 hear the clatter of the cabs and motors, and occasion- 
 ally catch — or thinks she catches — the sound of music 
 from the Whitelight. 
 
XV 
 
 THE GIRL THAT WAS HUNGRY 
 
 NAN was out of a job. 
 It isn't pleasant, being out of a job, as 
 many of us have at one time or another 
 learned. It somehow wears on the tissues, it rasps 
 the nerves ; in the end, it dulls those finer perceptions 
 whereby we normally distinguish what the profes- 
 sors of ethics call the moral values. 
 
 About that, however, Nan knew nothing, for this 
 was her first experience. Her mother had died in 
 their little Chicago flat three years before, when Nan 
 was fifteen; but her father, who had a good place in 
 one of the glue factories over in Packlngtown, had 
 kept his two daughters at school and maintained what 
 was, as such things go, a good home for them. 
 George, the only son, was a private in the army — 
 and the Philippines; they rarely heard from him. 
 Fanny, the older girl, was just about to graduate 
 from her course in stenography; but Nan, who was 
 pretty, had been decided to be too pretty to do any- 
 thing but marry — and as the duties of marriage are 
 not supposed to require a knowledge of economics, 
 either business or domestic. Nan was not precisely 
 fitted for a commercial career. She had one more 
 year to serve in the high school when her father, 
 from working too long in a badly-aired room, de- 
 veloped tuberculosis. Nan, who nursed him, had 
 
 183 
 
1 84 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 never understood that she had a job, but when her 
 father died she realized that she was out of one. 
 
 The father left just enough money to pay the ex- 
 penses of that extremely expensive luxury known as 
 Death. He demonstrated again what is being demon- 
 strated every minute everywhere — that, exorbitant 
 as is the cost of living, the cost of dying is beyond 
 all reason. 
 
 " Well," said I, when Nan, months later, told me 
 about it, "what did you do? " 
 
 I have said that Nan was once pretty. When her 
 father died, she must have been very pretty Indeed. 
 I believe that she was slim then, with a lithe figure, 
 pink-cheeked, and the proud possessor of a mass of 
 chestnut hair just touched by gold. Even when I met 
 her there was a genuine charm in her face, and all 
 that she had endured had failed quite to ruin the 
 glory of her great and once spaniel-like eyes. The 
 eyes widened when I asked her my question. 
 
 " Do? " she echoed. " What was we to do? It's 
 not what I done; it's how I was done." 
 
 Fanny got a place as stenographer in a Cleveland 
 automobile factory and left Chicago. George, being 
 a professional hero, remained unresponsive and Ir- 
 responsible In the Philippines. Nan sold the furni- 
 ture and moved into a hall bedroom on the profits. 
 
 One follows naturally one's training. Nan, being 
 quite sure that she had been trained for marriage — ■ 
 as she had never been trained for anything else, she 
 must have been trained for marriage — Nan began 
 to look over her boy friends with what the news- 
 paper " personals " call " a view to matrimony." 
 
 There were Tom, Dick, and Harry — several of 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS HUNGRY 1 85 
 
 each — but none of them was really ready or able to 
 support a wife. In fact, Nan speedily discovered that 
 she had unconsciously cultivated only such friends — 
 the others were stupid — as had small chance of being 
 ready for a good many years to come. 
 
 Tom had just started as a clerk in a law-office, 
 getting eight dollars a week; Dick was still in the 
 high school, getting nothing, and Harry, who was 
 quite the most fascinating of all, had not of late been 
 observably successful in the pursuit of a somewhat 
 nebulous occupation connected with running-horses 
 that did not run in Chicago. 
 
 " Wait till I'm admitted to the bar," said Tom. 
 " Only just wait for me, Nan. Why, it won't be but 
 a few years." 
 
 " Wait till I'm out o' school. Nan," pleaded Dick. 
 " I've got a fair job ready for me In a State Street 
 insurance office. If you only knew how much I cared 
 for you, you certainly could wait that little while." 
 
 And as for Harry, he said nothing at all. 
 
 Now, Nan was willing to wait; but her lan'3- 
 lady was not. Nan wanted to marry, but she was in 
 no great hurry about it. The thing that she was In 
 a hurry about was to remain alive. One cannot wait 
 even a few years without food and clothes and lodg- 
 ing; it is somewhat difficult to wait so much as a 
 few weeks without them, and Nan was used to a 
 home, a dress, and three meals a day. When the 
 money that had come from the furniture sale had 
 shrunk to a single yellow-backed bill. Nan decided 
 that, since openings were so rare in the career that 
 had been chosen for her, she must now choose an- 
 other career for herself, 
 
1 86 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 The month was August, and most employers, far 
 from engaging new workers, were " laying off " old 
 ones. Times had, moreover, been hard; there had 
 been one of our periodic, automatic panics In the 
 stock market, and the slow but certain approach of a 
 presidential election did not serve as an inducement 
 for business firms to enlarge their pay-rolls. Finally, 
 Nan had no " experience." 
 
 She began by hating that word " experience," and 
 she ended by fearing it. On the few occasions when 
 a job seemed to be just possible of capture, that job 
 was sure to leap nimbly away in answer to the in- 
 evitable question: 
 
 " What experience have you had? " 
 
 Once, toward the end. Nan lied. A man that 
 wanted a typist put the query, and Nan faltered out 
 the statement that she had had " a little." Then he 
 took her to the machine, and the inanimate mech- 
 anism straightway betrayed her. 
 
 It was at this period that she again fell in with 
 Dick, to whom much had been happening — and 
 rapidly. 
 
 Dick had decided to Improve his vacation by going 
 into that Insurance ofEce for the summer and learn- 
 ing the business. He had not learned the insurance 
 business, but he had speedily qualified for the position 
 of a barkeeper, and might have ended inside of a 
 white coat if he had not approached the trade from 
 across the counter. As it was, he absentmindedly 
 paid a wine-blU with a premium, and. Instead of a 
 white coat, came close to being fitted with a striped 
 one. 
 
 His descent was unimpeded. He lost his position 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS HUNGRY 187 
 
 and was cast off by his family. He tramped the 
 streets. Sometimes he begged, and, when begging 
 failed, he stole. When they wouldn't let him sleep in 
 the barrooms where he had spent his money, he slept 
 in the parks where there was none to be spent, and 
 when he was hustled out of the park he tried the bar- 
 room again. 
 
 It was not a happy life, and he was glad to get 
 out of it. He got out by becoming a " runner " for a 
 place that was neither a saloon nor a young ladies' 
 seminary. 
 
 Nan he met just as he was beginning an evening's 
 work. He drew her aside and suggested a drink, 
 which she refused, and reminded her that he had 
 loved her, to which her weary brain listened eagerly. 
 
 " You come with me," he said, " an' get out o' 
 all your troubles." 
 
 " Why," gasped Nan — and she looked hard, under 
 the lamplight, into his watery eyes—" can you marry 
 me now? " 
 
 Richard grinned uneasily. 
 
 "If you like," he said; and what hurt her most 
 was that he did not feel the pathos of her impulsive 
 query. " Anyhow, I've got a job for you." 
 
 " For me? " Her own eyes were wide. " Aren't 
 you workin' yourself?" 
 
 Richard made an answer. It was a long answer, 
 and it was both vague and glowing. But there is 
 this also about privation — that if it dulls the moral 
 insight, it sharpens one's vision of the human heart. 
 Nan had not gone so far as to suffer the former ill, 
 yet she had gone far enough to receive the latter 
 benefit. Beneath the salve she saw the sore. 
 
i88 THE GIRL JHAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " I hate you ! " she said. 
 
 Dick shrugged his shrunken shoulders. 
 
 "All right," he replied; " but you'll feel different 
 when you get hungry. Just remember, then, that I'm 
 always around this part o' town at this time o' day, 
 an' that I stand for beefsteak an' coffee — not to men- 
 tion the wine." 
 
 She left him without another word. Forget him 
 she could not, but, reviewing her weary struggle in 
 her weary soul, she decided that she had been mis- 
 directing her efforts. It had seemed incredible to 
 her that, with so much work to be done in the world 
 and with so many persons wanting to do it, there 
 should not be, ready to hand, her share. She had, 
 therefore, hunted blindly and by chance, starting with 
 the morning and walking the streets until the last 
 minute of the business day, entering whatever place 
 of employment appealed to her fancy. Now she be- 
 gan to study the " want advertisements " of the news- 
 papers. 
 
 But she fared no better. Early as she might seek 
 an advertiser, there were always many applicants 
 ahead of her, and among these there were always 
 many of long experience in the work offered. Over 
 two-thirds of the advertisers proved, in addition, to 
 want not work, but money. They required what 
 they called " a small deposit " to learn the business 
 or for " the preliminary paraphernalia." A large 
 number wanted canvassers to sell the unsalable on 
 
 small commissions. And others 
 
 Well, Nan went to see some of the others. This 
 one was typical : 
 
 He sat in a little office, a dark room at the back of 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS HUNGRY 189 
 
 a building on Dearborn Street. He had a heavy, 
 clean-shaven face, with a double chin, and little, 
 colorless eyes. He was alone and had advertised 
 for a clerk. 
 
 Nan sat down and held out her thumbed copy of 
 a morning paper. 
 
 " I've come in answer to your ad.," she said. 
 
 It was a well-worn formula; but she had then, 
 for a week, been trying to get along without break- 
 fasts. Her voice trembled. 
 
 The heavy man looked at her. His little eyes 
 were sharp — so sharp that she felt herself blushing. 
 He put out for the paper a stubby, dirty hand, and 
 he touched her hand as he took it. 
 
 " Yes," he said, but he wasn't looking at the 
 paper: he was looking at Nan. "What experience 
 have you had? " 
 
 Nan's red under lip quivered. 
 
 " I can learn," she almost whispered. 
 
 " D'you think you can? " The heavy man smiled 
 unpleasantly. 
 
 In a flash it came over Nan — what was In his 
 mind. He had done no more than touch her hand, 
 but Nan remembered Dick. 
 
 " You " — she did want work — " you advertised 
 for a clerk," she insisted. 
 
 The heavy man's smile continued. 
 
 " Ferget it," said he. 
 
 Nan started to rise, but the man put his dirty 
 hand upon her arm. He did not force her, but she 
 remembered that, only a few hours before, her land- 
 lady had demanded the past week's rent and that 
 
I90 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 the past week's rent Had not been forthcoming. She 
 sank back in her rickety chair. 
 
 " You don't want to be no clerk," said the man. 
 
 "I do! " said Nan; but there was small power in 
 her tone. 
 
 " Well," said the man, " give me your a^<f-dress 
 an' I'll think it over." 
 
 The girl complied, and the man noted the street 
 and number on a pad. 
 
 " There's a friend o' mine runs a place over in In- 
 diana," said the man. " It's a swell place, all right, 
 an' if you really didn't want to be no clerk " 
 
 " I do want to be a clerk! " 
 
 " Well, if you changed your mind, you could any- 
 how come round an' say so." 
 
 Nan mumbled something — she did not know what 
 — and went away. She spent the remainder of the 
 daylight in a vain repetition of the miserable quest, 
 and on her way back to the unpaid-for hall-bedroom 
 she passed the lighted windows of cafes, where, din- 
 ing in brilliant gowns, sat other women who, she 
 bitterly reflected, had at some period of their lives 
 not said " No " to their Dick. 
 
 Having got along without breakfasts. Nan now 
 got along without lunches — but she did not pay her 
 rent. The landlady threatened, but Nan, with hot 
 tears on her cold cheeks, begged for one week more 
 of grace, and got it. 
 
 She had been weary, she had been dispirited; now 
 she was hungry. 
 
 Were you ever hungry? I don't mean to ask if 
 you have ever sat so long at luncheon that you had 
 to stay overtime at the office and so were late for 
 
THE GI RL THAT WAS HUNGRY 1 9 1 
 
 dinner. I don't mean to inquire if you were ever dis- 
 appointed at finding that your train didn't carry a 
 buffet-car, or if in a strange city you spent all your 
 loose change by night and had next morning to post- 
 pone breakfast until you could be identified at the 
 bank. I don't mean to say: Did you ever want a 
 meal? I mean: Did you ever have to have one? 
 
 If you were ever in that position, there is no need 
 now to tell you how it feels. If you were never there, 
 description won't serve. Don't try to imagine it. 
 Don't try to think what it must be to walk with a 
 step that totters on a quest that is vain — to look with 
 eyes that see double for something that doesn't exist. 
 Don't bother about that. Just take my word for the 
 bare facts. Nan starved for three days, all the wliile 
 remembering Dick. On the evening of the third 
 
 day No, she did not meet him by chance. She 
 
 was done with chance. She quit hunting for work 
 and she hunted for Dick until she found him. 
 
 " Here I am," she said. " I'll stay till I get a 
 job." 
 
 But Richard smiled wisely. He knew his own 
 world well. 
 
 Here, if I were trying in these sketches to be a 
 tragic artist, that ought to be the end of my story. 
 I am not, however, trying to be, here and now, any- 
 thing of the sort. I am trying to give you a few facts 
 from life, and life has no fear of the anti-climax. 
 Therefore I proceed. 
 
 Nan became — not to mince matters — Dick's slave. 
 Dick ceased being a runner, working for precarious 
 commissions, and set up. In a two-room tenement, as 
 a small but full-fledged proprietor. He did not work 
 
192 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 at all. Nan did that; she worked — and walked. 
 Dick, if not sufficiently employed by spending the 
 money that she brought home, occupied the remainder 
 of his time by beating her in an effort to stimulate 
 her earning capacity. His friends, who were all in 
 the same line of business, said that they never saw a 
 more devoted woman; the poHcemen on the beat said 
 that they never saw one more hopelessly depraved. 
 So much had been accomplished by one month of 
 servitude. 
 
 Then came the tragedy. High-heeled, rouged, and 
 crayoned, Nan kissed Dick quite as usual one even- 
 ing, and, with her big leathern pocketbook swinging 
 from her hand, set out for work. This was at eight 
 o'clock. At nine she accosted a man — a man that 
 I happen to have met — and with him she returned 
 home. 
 
 Dick, having drunk a little harder than usual that 
 afternoon, had been tardy about returning to his fa- 
 vorite saloon. Consequently he was at the tenement 
 to meet the pair. 
 
 " Excuse me," said Dick, and began awkwardly to 
 shuffle toward the door. 
 
 But the man — he is a large man, with singularly 
 muscular arms and a singularly keen pair of blue 
 eyes — barred the way. 
 
 " You needn't hurry," he answered. " In fact, 
 we want to see you." 
 
 Dick's eyes stared. 
 
 " Me? " he asked. " What about? " 
 
 He had addressed himself, at least in part, to 
 Nan. It was, however, the stranger that replied. 
 
 " About this girl," said he. 
 
THE GIRL THAT WAS HUNGRY 193 
 
 Instantly Dick's face twisted hideously. He leaped 
 back. His right hand shot to his pocket. 
 
 " Don't try that," warned the stranger. " There's 
 a policeman waiting just outside." 
 
 Dick's hand fell. 
 
 "Are you a fly-cop?" he demanded. 
 
 " No ; only a man. What are you ? " 
 
 " None o' your business. What do you want with 
 my girl? " 
 
 " I want to tell you that she is not your girl any 
 longer. My wife needs another house-servant, and 
 Nan has agreed to try to hold down the place." 
 
 If Dick's face could be more hideous than it was 
 in hot anger, it became more hideous now in an anger 
 that was cold. He laughed. 
 
 "A house-servant?" he mocked. "Don't you 
 know what she is? " 
 
 " I know only what you have tried to make her," 
 said the stranger. 
 
 Dick turned to the girl. 
 
 " Do you dare? " he asked. 
 
 "Dare to go?" Her eyes were no longer the 
 eyes of a spaniel. " How long did you think I'd 
 stay? Did you think I liked it? Why, I told you 
 I was only waitin' till I got some other work! " 
 
 She has the other work now. She has had it for 
 three years. 
 
 Thus was evolved Dick's tragedy : Nan once more 
 had a job. 
 
XVI 
 
 A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 
 
 THROUGHOUT the letters that have come to 
 me concerning the girl that goes under in 
 the struggle for moral existence, and through- 
 out the talks that I have had with people inquiring 
 into this subject, two questions have been many times 
 repeated. They are questions that take various forms, 
 but that always reduce themselves to these plain 
 terms : 
 
 " Isn't it true that a heavy percentage of the girls 
 rescued from sex slavery or sex degradation revert, 
 after a greater or lesser time, to their former low 
 estate? " 
 
 "And if this is true, what Is the reason?" 
 
 These questions I think that I should here answer. 
 
 And the first answer is. Yes. 
 
 A great many girls classed as " rescued " return to 
 their previous condition. The precise percentage it 
 is impossible to give, because, concerning this traffic, 
 figures are everywhere hard to procure, and in the 
 United States, owing to our shocking neglect of such 
 matters, are almost beyond conjecture. Still, it Is 
 safe to say that this disease is like most other dan- 
 gerous diseases, whether physical or social — preven- 
 tion is hopeful, cure at best uncertain. The average 
 of life in the business is five years; after two of these 
 years, " rescue " is rare and most often but tempo- 
 
 194 
 
A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 195 
 
 rary. And of the others — of those that are 
 " rescued " when they have plied their trade for only 
 a month or six months or a year — a large number 
 revert to their former estate. 
 
 Why? 
 
 So many men, so many minds. I may give you 
 only the answer that, without predetermined bias, 
 was forced upon me by what I saw with my own 
 eyes. I believe that society has made these girls what 
 they are, and that society, once they have changed, 
 turns them back. 
 
 Not in all cases of retrogression. One is dealing 
 with the general law, not with its individual excep- 
 tions. There is the congenital case. There are the 
 women whose descent was due to vanity, to drunken- 
 ness, to the morphine habit — to some taste to the sat- 
 isfaction of which the descent was merely a means. 
 Even these cases, to be sure, are indirectly the fault 
 of social conditions that breed vicious proclivities as 
 inevitably as a dung-heap breeds flies. But they are 
 all exceptional. They are so exceptional as to be 
 practically negligible. The fault does not tend in 
 that direction. For the same reason, the failure. In 
 the many cases, of permanent " rescue " Is not justly 
 to be laid at the door of the self-sacrificing men and 
 women that are giving their earnest lives to " rescue 
 work." The failure lies at the door of us all as a 
 social group, because, not being content with the 
 wrong that we have already done, we either make It 
 well-nigh impossible for a " rescued girl " to get a 
 decent living at a decent wage or else we are so un- 
 charitable, so Irreligious, as always to regard that 
 girl In the light of her past. 
 
196 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 I could give you a score of cases In point. Any 
 mission worker can give you as many. All the gos- 
 sips in all the small towns will be glad to give you 
 more. Here, and only for the sake of illustration, I 
 give you one. 
 
 I go back in my memory scarcely a year and recall 
 the second floor over a saloon on East Nineteenth 
 Street, in New York, not far west of Broadway. 
 There were perhaps a dozen tables in the room, and 
 to these came — and probably still come — the street 
 women of that district; not with their prey (or, more 
 properly, their temporary masters), but alone, to rest 
 in the pauses of their walk, to meet each other, and to 
 drug themselves against the instinctive hatred of 
 what they must soon continue to do. 
 
 On this night that I remember, the room, at eleven 
 o'clock, was nearly empty and I was talking with a 
 girl at the farthest table in the darkest corner. She 
 sat there in the favorite attitude of her kind — the 
 scarcely touched glass before her, her elbows at 
 either side, her hands clasped under her thin chin. 
 From below the shadow of her broad, cheap hat with 
 corn flowers on it, I saw her tawny hair massed like 
 mined gold. Even in the shadow it was evident that 
 she need not have rouged her sunken cheeks; they 
 were hectic. Under her eyes there were dark spots; 
 her red mouth, once gentle, was bitter — bitterest 
 when she smiled. 
 
 She understood me. She had known me long 
 enough to understand my motive for asking her the 
 question that I had just asked her — well enough to 
 know that she could treat me merely as a friend. In 
 
A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 197 
 
 brief, she was satisfied that she could afford to be 
 honest with me. 
 
 " So I went to the institution," she was saying, 
 " and stopped there as long as they thought I ought 
 to stop there. I hadn't been in the business because 
 I liked it — who is? I'd been in it because that fellow 
 Joe had taught me to drink at a dance hall. He 
 taught me to drink. One night, of course, I drank 
 too much. When I woke up, I knew I could never go 
 back home." 
 
 She took a sip of beer. 
 
 "Why not?" I asked. 
 
 She regarded me with her steady gray eyes. 
 
 "I was afraid," she answered simply; "and 
 ashamed." 
 
 " So you didn't go back? " 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " I didn't go back," she said. " I did what he told 
 me to do. I hated it, but I did it. At first I kicked, 
 but he beat me. I couldn't run away. Where'd I 'a' 
 lived if I did? I hadn't no trade. I'd been little, I'd 
 been at school, so I hadn't no trade. I'd 'a' starved 
 to death in no time." 
 
 " You could have appealed to the police." 
 
 " He said he was friends with the police. I dunno. 
 He lied a good deal, of course, about most things. 
 But from what I saw, I knowed he was sure friends 
 with one or two of 'em." 
 
 " One or two aren't all. Besides, there are the 
 missions." 
 
 " Well, suppose the police had pinched him. What 
 then? It'd all be In the papers. I tell you, I was 
 ashamed. I didn't want my friends to know no more 
 
198 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 about me. Or suppose I'd gone to the mission. He 
 said — Joe did — the first thing they'd do'd be to send 
 for my father. I'd made trouble enough for my 
 father already. I didn't want to disgrace my people 
 any more'n I had done. Life's too short for that sort 
 of thing." 
 
 " So, rather than bring public shame upon your 
 family, you brought more shame upon yourself? " 
 
 " That's about it." 
 
 She spoke simply. There was no consciousness of 
 sacrifice in her tone, nothing of the heroic attitude. 
 She was talking of these things as if they were mat- 
 ters of course. 
 
 " So then," she took up the thread, " I went to 
 the institution." 
 
 " You mean you were sent there? " 
 
 " Sure I was sent." 
 
 " In other words, you were first arrested? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " The way it always happens. Business was bad; 
 times was hard. There wasn't a thing doing in the 
 part of town where the cops knew me. I had to get 
 the money; I didn't want another beating up by Joe. 
 So I tried to work another part o' town where the 
 cops was strange. A fellow winked at me. He 
 stopped me and spoke to me. He drew me on, and 
 then he pinched me." 
 
 "A plain-clothes man?" I asked. 
 
 The faded corn flowers in her hat bobbed assent. 
 
 " Central Office," she said. 
 
 " And he drew you on? " 
 
 " Sure he did." 
 
A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 199 
 
 " A lovely business 1 " I commented. 
 
 " Oh, I dunno ! " She couldn't see it my way. 
 " Life's too short to fight about them. Those tricks 
 is what they've got to do to earn their living — just 
 like what we do is the way we've got to earn 
 ours." 
 
 " Very like," said I. 
 
 But she was in no mood for speculative reflection. 
 
 " So, as I told you, I went to the institution," she 
 persisted. " It was third offense for me. I didn't 
 give my real name when I was in court and I told 
 the institution people that my father and mother 
 were dead, so I saved any trouble for my folks." 
 
 " Why didn't you think of that plan at the start, 
 when Joe first got you and when you considered ap- 
 pealing to the police on your own behalf? " 
 
 " I didn't know enough then ; I hadn't learnt to 
 lie. Besides, Joe would 'a' told them the truth if I'd 
 got him pinched; he'd 'a' made all the trouble he 
 could for my folks; and, anyhow, they'd 'a' looked 
 into the thing more careful than they do when you're 
 just one of a hundred girls run in front of the magis- 
 trate like a lot of sheep at a slaughter house." 
 
 " I see. Then, at last, they let you out of the 
 institution? " 
 
 " When my time was up — or a little before. I'd 
 been good. I liked it there — I'd 'a' liked anything 
 better than the streets. I learnt to sew a little and 
 to sweep and wash clothes. I even learnt to cook 
 some. There's no end of things you can learn if 
 you've only got time, ain't they? I certainly liked 
 it. Of course the people was some strict, but I guess 
 they had to be that; and you couldn't call the life 
 
200 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 a dizzy whirl of excitement. But I'd had about 
 all the excitement I wanted, thank you. For a while 
 I missed my drinks something terrible, but I soon got 
 over that, and then I was real happy. I worked hard 
 and just learned and learned and learned. I was so 
 good they shortened my time; so they come to me 
 and says, 
 
 " ' You've been a good girl, Sophie.' 
 
 " I says, ' Thank you, ma'am.' 
 
 " ' Yes,' they says, ' you've been a good girl. We 
 think you're reformed. You can go. If you won't 
 do no wrong no more, you can go.' 
 
 "'Go?' says I. 'Whereto?' 
 
 " ' Out,' says they. 
 
 " ' Then,' I says, ' I'd rather stay.' 
 
 " ' But you can't,' they tells me. ' They ain't room. 
 We're overcrowded, and they's lots of girls that are 
 going to the island now just because we ain't got 
 the room.' 
 
 " 'Well,' I says, ' if I've got to go, I've got to; 
 but I can't make no promises not to do wrong.' 
 
 " The woman that was talking to me, the matron- 
 like — an awful nice woman, she was — got kind of 
 shocked at that. 
 
 " ' Why not? ' she says. 
 
 Because,' I tells her, ' I'm afraid of starving, 
 and I'm afraid to throw myself in the East River, 
 like so many of us girls do; and I ain't a millionaire, 
 so I can't live on my income — and I ain't got no job.' 
 
 " ' Oh, but,' she says, ' we'll get you a job.' 
 
 " And she did get me a job, and it was a nice one 
 — a job with a lady that lived all alone in apartments 
 and wasn't very well and needed some one to cook 
 
A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 201 
 
 and do all the work and just all-round take care of 
 her. 
 
 " I liked that, too. The work was hard, but I 
 didn't mind. I was kind of glad I didn't have much 
 chance to go out of the house, for I was afraid of 
 running into Joe. Besides, I learnt a lot more while 
 I was working for that lady, and I like to learn things, 
 don't you? 
 
 " Of course I was scared about it at first. 
 
 Look here I ' I says to the matron at the in- 
 stitution; 'will this lady that you've got me a job 
 with know all about me ? ' 
 
 " ' Oh, yes,' she says, ' she'll know. We couldn't 
 send you to her under false colors,' she says. ' But 
 she's a kind lady; she wants to do you good, and she 
 won't never throw it up to you.' 
 
 " Well, she didn't throw it up to me — much, and I 
 was glad of that. It's pretty hard to keep doing 
 right when you know that the people you're working 
 for are all the time thinking how you used to do 
 wrong. I've heard since from other girls that has 
 went through what I went through that the ladies 
 they worked for worked them half to death, and 
 paid them almost nothing at all, and all the time 
 watched them suspicious-like, as bad as if they'd been 
 in jail. They say they've had it throwed up to them 
 all the time, and whenever anything was mislaid they 
 was accused of stealing it, till they was just made so 
 sick and discouraged that they had to go back to the 
 old ways again. But my lady, she wasn't like that. 
 
 " Of course sometimes she'd rub it in a bit. If I 
 smashed a plate, she'd say, ' Naturally you are used 
 to doing things carelessly ' — just like that, in a way 
 
202 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 that showed me what she was thinking about, and 
 that hurt a lot. But, take her all around, she was a 
 real nice lady, and I was happy there. 
 
 " It didn't last long, though. By and by we went 
 out to Denver for her health — she took me along — 
 and out there, first thing I knew, she died. I cer- 
 tainly was sorry for her." 
 
 Sophie paused. She looked beyond me, into the 
 shadows of the corner in that little room over an 
 East Nineteenth Street saloon. Then she took an- 
 other drink. She tried to smile, but the smile went 
 crooked; it was as if she were drinking to a safe 
 voyage in Charon's care for the kind lady that had 
 only once in a while rubbed it in a bit. 
 
 " Well," she resumed, " there I was in Denver, 
 out of a job. I went to an employment agency, and, 
 just about the time my money'd run out, one lady be- 
 gan to talk to me as if she might really hire me. 
 I remembered that stufF that the matron had said 
 about not being under false colors or something, so 
 I thought perhaps I'd better tell this woman the 
 truth. 
 
 " She didn't like it. She didn't like it a little bit. 
 
 " ' I am very sorry for you, my poor woman,' she 
 says ; ' but you did quite right to tell me. Of course 
 I couldn't have anybody in my family that has been 
 what you've been.' 
 
 "That was bad enough; but it didn't stop there. 
 This lady seen a friend of hers, another lady, coming 
 in the agency, and she told her, and the other lady 
 was mad and walks right up to the boss and asks him 
 what kind of a place he's running, anyhow — and the 
 boss chucks me out. 
 
A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 203 
 
 " I saw now that it was a case of sailing under 
 false colors or sinking the ship; so I made up my 
 mind to lie, after that. I went round from house to 
 house. Of course that sort of thing means low wages, 
 if you're lucky enough to get any. I got a place at 
 last on almost nothing at all. 
 
 " One day the husband of the woman I was work- 
 ing for there began to make eyes at me. He came in 
 the kitchen and asked me questions about New York. 
 He said he used to live in New York before he was 
 married, and he asked me if I knew this place or 
 that — all the sort of places that I did use to know 
 when I was in the town. I happened to say ' Yes,' 
 not thinking what it meant, and then he tried to kiss 
 me. 
 
 " * You get out ! ' I says. 
 
 " * Don't be foolish,' he tells me. ' I'm not going 
 to hurt you.' 
 
 " ' If you don't let up,' I says, * I'm going to 
 hurt you, and do it quick, too.' 
 
 He kind of bristled up at that. 
 
 " ' Look here,' he says, ' I'm on to you, and if 
 you're not nice to me I'll tell my wife the truth about 
 you.' 
 
 " ' Seems to me there'd be something to tell her 
 about you, too,' I says. 
 
 " He didn't answer nothing. He just laughed 
 and grabbed me." 
 
 Sophie paused again. 
 
 "Well?" I asked. 
 
 " Well," she resumed, " I slapped his face for 
 him, and he told his wife that I'd been a bad girl. 
 I told her what he'd tried on with me, but she just 
 
204 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 thought I was a liar, so she got mad and fired 
 me." 
 
 "Was that the end?" 
 
 " Not quite. I tried a lot of other places, but I 
 couldn't get a job. Near all of them wanted recom- 
 mendations, and I hadn't none that was any good. 
 The lady that died'd given me one, but it was pretty 
 stale by this time. I pretty near starved. 
 
 " One night, on the street (I was tired out and 
 hungry) , I seen that man that had tried to kiss me. 
 
 "'Hello, dear!' he says. 'Where you going?' 
 
 " ' Up to Glenwood Springs to spend the summer,' 
 I says. ' Where'd you think? ' 
 
 " He grinned at me. 
 
 " ' I can help you get there,' he says. 
 
 " ' You helped me lose a decent job,' says I. He'd 
 put an idea in my head. ' I'm played out. I'm all 
 in. Can't you fix it up somehow so's I can get work? ' 
 
 " ' You don't want to work,' he says. 
 
 " ' I do, too,' says I. 
 
 " But he just grinned. 
 
 " ' You're too pretty,' he says. ' Come along with 
 me and I'll give you some money.' 
 
 " Well, I was dead beat. I made up my mind that 
 there wasn't any chance for me, that people'd never 
 forgive me. He said he'd give me enough to get 
 me to Chicago on my way to New York. I went 
 with him, but next morning he gave me only enough 
 to get to Lincoln, Neb. When I reminded him of 
 his promise, he told me to go to blazes." 
 
 " What did you do? " I inquired. 
 
 " I went to blazes," she answered quietly. 
 
 "Right away?" 
 
A CASE OF RETROGRESSION 205 
 
 " Not direct. I went there by way of Lincoln, 
 Neb. I earned enough at the old trade in Lincoln 
 to get me to Chicago, and in Chicago I tried hard to 
 get a decent job again." 
 
 " But that man in Denver," I interrupted, " the 
 man that virtually ruined you for the second time — 
 how you must hate him ! " 
 
 She shrugged her thin shoulders. 
 
 " Oh, I don't know ! " she said. " Where's the 
 good of hating people? I don't like to hate people." 
 
 " What was his name? " 
 
 " I dunno, and I wouldn't never tell you if I did. 
 I know you; you'd make trouble for him. That's 
 your way. Well, it ain't mine. I don't want to 
 make trouble for nobody. He wasn't no worse than 
 most men." 
 
 I gave it up. 
 
 " So you went to Chicago? " 
 
 " Yep. I got a place there at last in a boarding- 
 house as third servant. 
 
 " I stuck to it for a while. I don't pretend I liked 
 it — all the men boarders tried to get fresh, and then, 
 because the men liked me, all the women was sus- 
 picious. Still, I kept the men in their places and 
 I held on to the job till a new boarder come to the 
 place. He turned out to be a fellow that had made 
 love to me — made regular love to me — in Lincoln — 
 till he got tired of it. Well, he told the landlady 
 about me, and out I was chucked." 
 
 "And then?" said I. 
 
 " Then it was the Denver show over again — only 
 worse. When I got down and out, I went wrong. 
 I didn't know the cops; I hadn't no pull; I was run 
 
2o6 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 in and kicked about— and one night I met my old 
 fellow Joe down on Dearborn Street. He was going 
 to New York." 
 
 " Did you run away from him? " I asked. 
 
 The grave gray eyes looked at me from over the 
 shadows where lurked the tokens of the White Death. 
 Sophie gulped the rest of her beer. 
 
 " I must be hustling," she said. " I've got to do 
 better in the next three hours than I've been doing 
 loafing here." 
 
 "Then you didn't run away from him?" 
 
 "Runaway? Who? Me? What to? Starva- 
 tion? Not much! I'd given things a fair chance. 
 I was done, I was. There was Joe. Take it from 
 me, I was never so glad to see anyone in all my life." 
 
XVII 
 
 " THOSE THINGS WHICH WE OUGHT TO HAVE 
 DONE " 
 
 THE Church of St. Chrysostom was crpwded 
 by its usual congregation. The massive doors 
 — a gift from the rector's warden and a 
 replica of the doors in the Church of St. Anastasio 
 in Verona — shut out all the noises of Fifth Avenue. 
 Inside the only sound was the voice of the priest 
 among the candles, pronouncing the Admonition. 
 His was a clear voice, steady with earnestness, and 
 it reached the hearts of his well-to-do auditors: 
 
 "... confess them with an humble, lowly, 
 penitent, and obedient heart; to the end that we may 
 obtain forgiveness of the same ..." 
 
 The congregation knelt and with one voice re- 
 peated the General Confession: 
 
 "Almighty and most merciful Father; we have 
 erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. 
 We have followed too much the devices and desires 
 of our own hearts. We have offended against thy 
 holy laws. We have left undone those things which 
 we ought to have done; and we have done those 
 things which we ought not to have done ; and there is 
 no health in us . . ." 
 
 The service went Its usual course. The Sunday 
 was the Fourth Sunday in Advent, and the rector 
 read the collect for that day: 
 
 207 
 
2o8 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and 
 come among us; that whereas, through our sins and 
 wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in run- 
 ning the race that is set before us, thy bountiful 
 grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; 
 through the satisfaction of thy Son our Lord . . ." 
 
 As the crowd came out Into the winter sunshine of 
 the Avenue, Mrs. Norton — she was the wife of that 
 W. Barnabas Norton who, as rector's warden, had 
 presented the studded doorway to St. Chrysostom's 
 for a memorial to their little girl that had died — 
 found herself in the midst of an anecdote. She was 
 talking to Mrs. Rutherford Hemmingway, her dear- 
 est friend. 
 
 "It was quite dreadful," she was saying; "but, 
 really, Alicia, what else on earth was there for me to 
 do ? How the girl ever got into my service — how the 
 housekeeper ever failed to investigate her character 
 and recommendations — I can't for the life of me 
 imagine. I was frankly angry with the housekeeper 
 about it." 
 
 " Of course you were, my dear," said Mrs. Hem- 
 mingway. 
 
 " And I don't deny," pursued Mrs. Norton, " that 
 Maud — I think her name was Maud — was a satis- 
 factory maid, so far, of course, as I ever had a 
 chance to observe her. But when the policeman on 
 the beat came to Mr. Norton and told him that when 
 he had been on the Broadway squad a year before — 
 the policeman, I mean — he had arrested this girl 
 for street-walking (only fancy how horrible, Alicia !), 
 what choice did I have? " 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 209 
 
 "None," replied Mrs. Hemmlngway; "none at 
 all. — Here is your brougham, Patricia. — You could 
 remember only that you had to perform a duty to 
 society." 
 
 " That is precisely what I remembered," said Mrs. 
 Norton. " Barnabas spoke about the girl's devo- 
 tion to our little Stephen (it was eight months ago, 
 and Stephen had just had his fifth birthday, I recol- 
 lect) ; but I said to him : ' My dear, there is nothing 
 unusual in her fondness for Stephen: who can help 
 being fond of the darling? We must not forget that 
 James is our son, too; that he is nineteen years old 
 and at an impressionable age; and, above all, we 
 must not forget that if respectable people are to over- 
 look such things as this girl Maud has done, there 
 is no telling what will happen to the world.' " 
 
 They were in the carriage now and were rolling, 
 softly and swiftly, up the Avenue. 
 
 " If you had said any less," declared Mrs. Hem- 
 mingway, " you would have failed in your duty." 
 
 Mrs. Norton's plumed hat nodded agreement. 
 
 " Exactly," said she. " It is all very well for the 
 rector to talk of reformation; but what time have I 
 to reform my own servants? There are plenty of 
 institutions and missions and so on to attend to such 
 things. I am sure they are always asking for money, 
 and, for my part, I make a point of contributing al- 
 most regularly. One Lent I went twice to St. Cecilia's 
 Home and read to the girls : I read them ' The 
 Visits of Elizabeth.' " 
 
 Mrs. Hemmlngway murmured consolatory com- 
 mendation. 
 
 " Of course," said Mrs. Norton, " I didn't want 
 
2IO THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 this Maud to be treated too badly; but I was angry 
 at the housekeeper for allowing such an awkward 
 thing to occur, and so I neglected to give her any 
 instructions beyond telling her the facts and ordering 
 her to dismiss the girl immediately." 
 
 "And she did it?" 
 
 " Naturally." 
 
 " So that you didn't see the girl again until last 
 night?" 
 
 " Not until last night. We were leaving the 
 Herald Square — the Billy Merton's theater-party, 
 you know — and, just as I was stepping into the 
 motor, there, walking into the light, came Maud. 
 Alicia, you never saw such a change in any woman in 
 your life — not even in Mrs. Vanderdecken Brown 
 after she got her new hair. Maud's cheeks were 
 rouged the color of red ink; her eyes were full of 
 belladonna, and she was dressed up in the cheapest 
 and vulgarest of finery. There was no mistaking her 
 vocation — and, what was worse, no mistaking her in- 
 tention that nobody should mistake it. It was too 
 disgusting." 
 
 " How awful, Patricia I " 
 
 " That is what I thought. All in a flash I remem- 
 bered that this painted woman used actually to live 
 under my roof and fondle — think of it, Alicia: 
 fondle! — my baby boy. She'd been bad and she had 
 gone right back to her old ways. It showed plainly 
 that there was no good in her. I was suddenly 
 afraid that she might have the impudence to speak to 
 me. There we were, face to face. I happened to 
 have a twenty-dollar bill in my opera-bag. It was 
 sticking out of the top, I just took it and put it into 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 2 1 1 
 
 her hand before anyfeody of our party had an oppor- 
 tunity to see what I was doing." 
 
 In a disordered bedroom on the third-floor back 
 of a dingy West Twenty-ninth Street boarding-house 
 (its landlady called it a boarding-house) a few 
 nights — or, rather, a few mornings — later, a girl 
 sat alone, evidently waiting for the coming of some- 
 one whose coming she feared. 
 
 She was still a pretty girl. Her cheeks, sufficiently 
 colored to hide their pallor, had not yet lost all their 
 roundness; the line of her full lips had not yet be- 
 come hard. Her hair, which had always been too 
 black for tinting, was so thick as to be almost lux- 
 uriant; what privation had stolen from the contours 
 of her figure, artifice, beneath the poor, showy dress 
 that covered it, supplied; and If her eyes had lost 
 a zest that drugs could no longer simulate, they had 
 gained an animal appeal that had an attraction of 
 its own. 
 
 The room was not a pleasant one. The crooked 
 shade that was drawn across the single window 
 hid an ugly court, beyond which was a church-tower 
 with a clock that struck the half-hours. The wall- 
 paper was so faded that its original design was lost, 
 and the only decorations were one or two unframed, 
 highly-colored prints from the Sunday supplement of 
 a sensational newspaper and a garish calendar Issued 
 in the interests of the nearest wholesale liquor-shop. 
 On a rickety wash-stand was a cracked pitcher in a 
 cracked basin; across the door that led Into a neigh- 
 boring room there had been drawn a ramshackle 
 
212 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 bureau, with a clouded mirror and with drawers that 
 would not wholly shut. The bed — the girl was sitting 
 on the bed — was unmade. 
 
 A shambling step sounded on the stairs and a 
 heavy hand fell, as lightly as it could, upon the 
 door. 
 
 " Maud," said a thick, low voice. 
 
 The girl on the bed started. She looked about her 
 as if seeking for a corner In which to hide. 
 
 " Maud," repeated the voice, " are you In there? " 
 
 " Yes," said the girl. " That you. Mart? " 
 
 " Sure it's me. Is It all right? Can I come In? " 
 
 " Come ahead, Mart." 
 
 The door opened, and there entered a man that 
 had to stoop to do so. He was a raw-boned man, 
 thin except for a swelling abdomen, and he wore a 
 suit of some light checkered material. He carried a 
 warm overcoat over his arm, and In the purple tie 
 at the base of his thick neck was thrust a constellation 
 of paste diamonds In the form of a horseshoe. 
 
 He sat on the only chair — a creaking chair placed 
 directly under the flaring gas-jet beside the window — 
 and, with a loud grunt, crossed his legs. 
 
 "Well?" he said interrogatively. 
 
 He had a thick, coarse face, with an obtruding 
 chin and a bulging forehead from which the low- 
 growing hair — oily hair — was parted In a ridiculous 
 wave. His shaggy eyebrows hung far over the dull 
 coals that were his eyes. His nose showed that it had 
 been at least once broken and never properly set, and 
 his lips, from which a much-chewed cigar hung 
 limply, were divided between a natural tendency to 
 loll and an habitual sneer. 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 213 
 
 The girl looked at him and away quickly — like a 
 dog. 
 
 "Well?" he repeated. "Can't you talk? 
 Where's the coin? Dig up. Come on, now: dig 
 up ! " He seemed to realize the canine quality of 
 her movement : he spoke to her as some human beings 
 speak to dogs. 
 
 Maud raised her skirt, took a handful of money 
 from her stocking, handed him the money and drew 
 sharply away. 
 
 " It — it ain't much," she faltered. 
 The man looked at it, holding it in his extended, 
 dirty palm. Some of it fell through his thick fingers 
 and dropped to the floor. His brow darkened. 
 " Where's the rest ? " he asked. 
 " That's all I got. Mart." 
 "I said: where's the rest?" 
 
 "That's all. Mart. Honest " The girl 
 
 shrank from his glowering eyes, with an arm drawn 
 up to shield her face. " Honest, that's every cent 
 of it." 
 
 The man grunted. He heaved one shoulder 
 high, while he thrust the money into his pocket. 
 " You'rie a liar," he said quietly. 
 
 " Mart " 
 
 " You're a liar. Why, the other night some fool 
 give you a twenty-dollar bill I Here it is Christmas- 
 time, and the streets just naturally full of drunks, 
 and you ask me to believe that you've only taken in 
 seven dollars for a night's work. Seven dollars! 
 How d'you think I'm goin' t' live, huh ? " 
 
 He walked over to the bed and calmly slapped 
 the girl in the face with his heavy, open hand. 
 
214 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 She fell backward, sobbing. 
 
 " Come on, come on ! " he commanded. 
 "Cough I" 
 
 " That's all there is," sobbed the girl. " Honest, 
 honest, I didn't get another cent." 
 
 Martin stepped away with a litheness that you 
 would not have suspected in a man of his size. He 
 took off his coat, folded it neatly, and laid it on a 
 chair. 
 
 " Now then," he said, " you lie still. I'm goin' 
 to search you. If I find you're holdin' out on me, 
 I'll drive every tooth you've got down your throat. 
 If I find you're tellin' the truth, I'll know you've 
 been lazy and I'll give you a beatin'-up worth re- 
 memberin'." 
 
 He proceeded to keep his word. 
 
 Maud, you will observe, was a wicked woman. 
 She was one of those shameless persons that you hear 
 whispered about — rarely honestly and openly de- 
 scribed. This miserable, unhealthy room was what 
 is called a gilded palace of vice. Those bedraggled, 
 insufficient clothes were the purple silks and fine linen 
 of evil. That hard, tumbled bed was the downy 
 couch of her slothful ease. The brass ring on the 
 third finger of her left hand was the elaborate 
 jewelry of the wrongdoer. Her emaciated, death- 
 sentenced body was the pampered piece of silken- 
 skinned flesh that you hear so frequently anathemat- 
 ized. That seven dollars, her entire earnings, which 
 she had handed over to her owner, represented the 
 enormous wages of sin, and, when they went into 
 Mart's pocket, they went where nearly all such wages 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 2 1 5 
 
 go. Her life was the easy, care-free, well-fed, well- 
 housed, well-clothed, happy life of the street-woman 
 — including the blows. 
 
 You have heard a good deal about the easy, merry 
 time that these bad women have. Oddly enough, 
 Maud didn't enjoy it. 
 
 Oddly enough, too, she hadn't wanted to begin 
 it; hadn't wanted to continue in it; hadn't wanted to 
 go back to it from the service of Mrs. W. Barnabas 
 Norton's housekeeper. 
 
 Maud had worked in a shirtwaist factory, and 
 when the factory — owing to improper building-laws 
 — had burned, Maud was unlucky enough not to be 
 among the sixty young girls that were killed. She 
 had gone a long time without employment. Then 
 she had got a job, at five dollars a week, in another 
 factory. On five dollars a week she had managed 
 somehow to keep alive until there was a lock-out. 
 Then, one evening when she was faint from starva- 
 tion. Mart, whose business it was to watch young 
 women that were hungry, had " picked her up " — 
 this is the plain phrase for it — and offered her a 
 supper. Whisky on an empty stomach had done the 
 rest. 
 
 Yet, one day, Maud, with her strength partially 
 renewed, had run away. She got a job as a servant. 
 She even, at last, got into the eminently respectable 
 household of Mrs. W. Barnabas Norton — and she 
 left that household in the form and manner here- 
 inbefore described. 
 
 What happened? This happened — the third-floor 
 back in Twenty-ninth Street; the repetition of the 
 old life happened, the blows: Mart. She had been 
 
2i6 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 dismissed without a recommendation; she could get 
 no other place as a servant; she could get no other 
 place as a factory-hand. The idea of a mission or a 
 " rescue home " never occurred to her. She was too 
 discouraged. In the language of the street, she went 
 back. 
 
 Mrs. Norton had done nothing — really. She 
 had — really — only refrained from doing something. 
 Why not? Mrs. W. Barnabas Norton is a busy 
 woman, and Maud was a bad girl. 
 
 " Now then," said Mart. 
 
 He was perspiring profusely, but, as he resumed 
 his seat on the creaking chair, he tilted himself 
 against the wall with the relieved sigh of duty done. 
 He looked at the convulsive bundle of clothes on the 
 bed: Martin also had performed an obligation to 
 society. 
 
 " Now then," he resumed, " I want you to listen 
 here. Are you on? " 
 
 The bundle of clothes sobbed assent. 
 
 " Me an' Shorty 've got a little game, an' you've 
 got to help out. See? " 
 
 Again the bundle sobbed in a maryier that assured 
 him of its attention. 
 
 "Shorty's got hold of a rich guy from up the 
 Avenue — a kid he is — that wants to see the town. 
 Shorty says the kid always has a wad in his clothes. 
 Shorty says he'll like as not have extra on Christmas 
 Eve, an' if the thing's worked right we can easy get 
 his check for more. Well, the kid ain't ever seen 
 me — ner won't till I'm good an' ready — but Shorty'U 
 tell him he's got somethin' worth while on tap. 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 2 1 7 
 
 Shorty'll say it's a married woman with a husband 
 on the L night-service, an' '11 say he's fixed it up — 
 Shorty has — fer the kid, with the wife. Shorty'll 
 direct the kid up here. The kid'll come. You be 
 mighty sweet to him. I'll hammer on the door. 
 The door'll be locked. Then me for a star-entrance 
 by this here door back o' the bureau. Me, the out- 
 raged husband with a gun. — All the money the kid's 
 got an' all he can write checks for. It's all bein' 
 fixed fer to-morrow night at eleven-thirty : Christmas 
 Eve. Understand? " 
 
 Apparently the girl did understand. At any rate, 
 she sobbed herself to sleep at last. She slept in her 
 clothes and did not wake till the gray light of the 
 December morning was peeping around the edges of 
 the crooked window-shade. Then, when she had 
 listened for a while to the irregular snoring of Mart, 
 she stole, with infinite timidity, from bed and un- 
 dressed and rubbed her bruises and lay down in her 
 chemise to get what rest was left her. Mart, how- 
 ever, had wrapped the blanket about his sturdy 
 form, so she shivered a good deal. She did not dare 
 to shiver much, for fear that she should wake him. 
 
 She lay there, staring at the seamed celling, and 
 wondering, very vaguely, what was the matter with 
 the world. She did not regret what she had done 
 in it — she was past that sort of thing; she was a bad 
 girl — she regretted only the consequences to herself. 
 She did not look forward with especial shrinking to 
 the badger-game that Mart had planned for Christ- 
 mas Eve ; she shrank only from the thought of what 
 Mart would do to her if she should somehow bungle 
 her part in it — she thought that he would likely 
 
2i8 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 enough beat her to the brink of extermination. And 
 she wondered why these things should be so. 
 
 Would there ever be a time when they were not so ? 
 She doubted it. Would there ever be a time when 
 the Martins would not make their livings by exploit- 
 ing those Mauds who could not find a chance to be 
 exploited in another way? It seemed so unneces- 
 sary. It seemed such a waste of human energies, 
 of human lives that the world had other need of — 
 that the world demanded and could not get. 
 
 She had glimpses of this — fragmentary, distorted 
 glimpses, always through the clouded glasses of her 
 own wants. The world was doing much ; but it was 
 leaving, of all that it could do and ought to do, so 
 much — so very much — undone. The world resem- 
 bled Mart. Like Mart it was asleep, and moaning 
 as it slept. 
 
 Long before half-past eleven on Christmas Eve 
 the room had been made ready. The crooked win- 
 dow-shade had been straightened; the cracked water- 
 jug and basin had been replaced by new ones; a 
 couple of framed prints had been hung where the 
 grotesques from the Sunday supplements were form- 
 erly tacked, and the bureau, its drawers all jammed 
 into place, was dragged a few inches farther from 
 the door that it was supposed to hide. 
 
 Maud sat on the single chair — they had decided 
 not to have two chairs — and, apathetically, waited. 
 They had bought her a new frock — a loose, pale- 
 blue wrapper — and the color suited her. Her black 
 hair flowed over her shoulders and the light, turned 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 2 1 9 
 
 rather low, was not sufficiently strong to betray her. 
 
 Mart tapped on the hidden door. 
 
 "AH right?" he asked. He did not have to 
 raise his voice much : the door was thin. 
 
 " AH right," Maud answered. 
 
 " I'll stay here tiH he comes," said Mart. " Then 
 I'll wait twenty minutes and then rattle at the other 
 door. Be sure he pipes you lockin' that one an' be 
 sure you're half scared to death when I call. Then 
 I'll run back here an' come in by this way, gun an' 
 aH." 
 
 She reflected that she would not have to sham 
 fear of Mart in any circumstances. 
 
 " It ain't loaded, that gun?" she quavered. 
 
 She heard Mart laugh. 
 
 " Sure it's loaded. I don't want my bluff called. 
 Maybe I'll have to let him have one — just a little 
 high one, you know, to jolt him up some." 
 
 "But, Mart '^ 
 
 " None o' that now." He had been in high spirit- 
 ous humor, but his tone grew ugly, more ugly even 
 than common, at any hint of protest; it was like the 
 warning growl of a feeding beast whose prey is 
 threatened. " None o' your lip. If you don't put 
 this thing through without side-steppin', I'll let you 
 have some o' the gun, an' I won't shoot high, neither. 
 It's Hshsh ! Here they come ! " 
 
 His voice stopped, and Maud, alone in the narrow 
 bedroom, heard the front door close at the other 
 end of the house. She heard feet ascend the stairs 
 and traverse the hall — a heavy, familiar pair that 
 knew their way in the darkness, and another pair, 
 lighter, uncertain, that followed. 
 
220 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 Someone knocked at the door. 
 
 " Come in," said Maud. 
 
 An ugly, dark face — a face marked by a yellow 
 scar from lip to eye— was thrust through the barely 
 opened door. 
 
 " Hello, Shorty," said Maud. 
 
 " Good-evenin', Mrs. Smith," said Shorty. He 
 did not come in. " Everythin' clear? " 
 
 " Yes," said Maud. 
 
 Shorty winked wickedly. 
 
 "Husband gone?" he asked. 
 
 " Yes, he's gone this half-hour an' more," said 
 Maud, repeating a lesson. 
 
 " Well, we thought we'd be on the safe side," 
 said Shorty: " he's got such a temper that there hus- 
 band o' yourn. Here's the young gentleman I told 
 you about." 
 
 " Bring him in." 
 
 " I'll let him come in alone ; I gotta meet Hoskins 
 over to the corner. So long! " 
 
 Shorty flung wide the door; shoved a lad through 
 the opening, and closed the door behind him. They 
 could hear Shorty's footsteps rumbling down the hall. 
 
 The visitor was a delicately built, anaemic boy of 
 nearly twenty. He had a narrow forehead, topped 
 by tow-colored hair. His pale eyes were shifty and 
 watery, and he had a nervous twitch to his thin lips. 
 He was like a thousand lads of his environment in 
 every large city: precocious, perverted, neurotic. 
 
 Maud gasped. The trade smile that she had pre- 
 pared for him stiffened on her lips. She was alone 
 with James, the eldest son of Mrs. W. Barnabas 
 Norton. 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 221" 
 
 " You ! " she whispered. " You ! " 
 
 But James, though he was surprised, was by no 
 means disconcerted. He tossed his silk hat on the 
 bed and, producing a cigarette from a gold case, pro- 
 ceeded to smoke. 
 
 "Well, well, well!" he laughed. "Who'd 
 a-thought it? Didn't know you were married, 
 Maud." 
 
 " I — I'm " stuttered the woman. 
 
 James reached out a gloved hand and patted 
 her cheek. The rouge hid a deeper pallor than 
 usual. 
 
 "This is luck!" said James. "Little stand-off, 
 prim, touch-me-not Maudie. Well, well! Welcome 
 to our city ! " 
 
 He sat down on the bed and, suddenly encircling 
 her waist, dragged her beside him. 
 
 Her heart hammered in her breast. She remem- 
 bered the Norton home; the Norton baby that she 
 had loved — the one living creature that she had 
 loved without receiving a wound in return — and she 
 remembered Mart in the next room, with the re- 
 volver. 
 
 " Don't ! " she whispered. " Listen a min- 
 ute " 
 
 "Not a second!" laughed Norton loudly. He 
 thrust out his legs and knocked his heels together in 
 his huge enjoyment of his joke. " I've got on to 
 your curves at last," he said. " I've found you out, 
 Maudie. I always tried to give you the glad eye at 
 home; but you'd pretend not to notice; and then you 
 went away, nobody seemed to know why, and here — 
 well, here we are, aren't we?" 
 
222 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 He tried to kiss her, but she pushed his face away. 
 She glanced over her shoulder at the other door. 
 
 " Stop ! " she whispered. She was trying to gain 
 time; trying to think. "Of course I wouldn't look 
 at you there," she added in a louder voice to win a 
 moment more and to satisfy the listener at the door. 
 Why hadn't Mart told her the name of his victim? 
 Why had she come to think nothing of names? Why 
 had she permitted her sentimental respect for her 
 former employers to keep her from mentioning their 
 name to Mart? " Of course I wouldn't look at you 
 there," she found herself, with significant emphasis, 
 repeating. 
 
 "But now — eh, Maudie?" laughed Norton. 
 " How about now? Things are different now, aren't 
 they?" 
 
 She looked again at the door. She shivered. She 
 couldn't think, yet she must gain time. 
 
 " Kiss me ! " commanded Norton. 
 
 "No, no!" 
 
 " Come on. What you afraid of? " 
 
 " Nothing. Of course, I ain't afraid of any- 
 thing." 
 
 " Then, come on." 
 
 She raised her cold face to him and, trembling, al- 
 lowed him to kiss her on the mouth. She was to 
 have twenty minutes; It seemed as If thirty had al- 
 ready passed. 
 
 "What you shaking about?" demanded Norton. 
 
 " Hush ! " she whispered, and then said, in a more 
 normal tone : " I'm just thinkin' what If my hus- 
 band'd come in." 
 
 " Well, I'm not," said Norton. " I'm thinking 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 223 
 
 this is a pretty raw deal. Do you think I'm going 
 to do all the kissing and you not " 
 
 " Hush ! " she pleaded. 
 
 " I won't hush. I tell you " 
 
 " Then, here ! " cried Maud. " And here! " 
 
 She flung her arms about him and kissed him, with 
 calculated vigor, upon either cheek. And then, with 
 her mouth against his ear, she began to whisper : 
 
 " Listen. Don't answer. Don't talk. Listen. You 
 must get out. You must go now and go quick. Don't 
 ask why. Go. And once you've started, you must 
 run — run ! " 
 
 He drew back from her, his mouth twitching, his 
 eyes large. 
 
 "Why?" he asked. 
 
 She scarcely understood the question. 
 
 " Go ! " she whispered. " I told you not to ask 
 why." 
 
 "But why?" he demanded loudly. 
 
 " Because — because your people were so kind to 
 me " 
 
 "Oh, rot!" 
 
 " Because, I loved that little baby-brother of yours 
 so that I— that I " 
 
 " Get out, Maudie. Don't talk that sort of gush; 
 it don't go with all this stage-setting, you know." 
 
 " Then — -then because your mother " 
 
 " Don't talk about her, please." 
 
 She tried to quiet him by a lying reason. 
 
 " Because your mother met me on the street the 
 other night and gave me twenty dollars," she 
 whispered. 
 
 Norton laughed again. 
 
2 24 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 " I'm going to give you twenty-five," said he. 
 " See here " — he grew angry now and his voice rose 
 higher — "why aren't you nice to me? Out with it, 
 now! Why?" 
 
 It seemed to her that he nearly shouted. She 
 glanced again, involuntarily, toward the door — the 
 door behind which, revolver in hand, stood Mart, 
 who had told her to be mighty sweet to her visitor 
 and had threatened her life. 
 
 " Go ! " she pleaded. 
 
 " I won't go ! " yelled Norton. " What you look- 
 ing behind that bureau for? Yah! " His mouth 
 
 twitched; his jaw dropped. " It's — it's a trap! " he 
 shrieked. *' It's a badger-game ! It's " 
 
 " Yes; yes; yes ! " she cried. She didn't care now. 
 He was the son of her benefactress; the baby's 
 brother. With a quick access of nervous strength, 
 she caught him by the shoulders, whirled him about, 
 and hurled him through the door by which he had 
 entered. 
 
 He must have understood her then, for she heard 
 him crash down the hall and down the stairs. She 
 was conscious that Mart, out of the darkness, hurdled 
 by her with an oath; but she heard Norton reach the 
 front door first and bang it after him. 
 
 Then she heard Mart slowly reascend the stairs. 
 
 He came into the little room, and she shrank to 
 the farthest corner at the sight of him. He haH 
 been drinking all day against the prospective activi- 
 ties of this evening. Now he was not hot with anger; 
 he was cold with it. He held the revolver in his huge 
 hand. He was smiling, and when she saw the smile 
 on his thick lips, she cried out. 
 
THINGS WE OUGHT TO HAVE DONE 225 
 
 " Get up," said Mart. 
 
 She got up. 
 
 " I heard you," said Mart. 
 
 The clock in the church steeple began to strike, 
 the chimes to ring. It was Christmas morning. 
 
 She stretched out her thin arms to him. 
 
 "Marti Oh, Mart ^" 
 
 Mart slowly raised the revolver. 
 
 " Say your prayers," he commanded — " fer the last 
 time." 
 
 The chimes rang forth their message of peace on 
 earth and good will to men. They rang so loudly 
 that the policeman on the corner heard nothing 
 else. 
 
 They never caught Mart, It was only a back- 
 alley crime, so the police were not greatly worried, 
 and the papers that are read by the congregation of 
 St. Chrysostom's did not so much as mention it. 
 
 St. Chrysostom's had, nevertheless, a most suc- 
 cessful Christmas service. Mrs. Rutherford Hem- 
 mlngway said she had never heard a better Te Deum 
 better sung not even at St. George's Grosvenor 
 Square. 
 
 Mrs. Norton agreed with her. Mrs. Norton knew 
 nothing of the murder, either then or later. She 
 was not concerned in it. She had done nothing — 
 really. She had — really — only refrained from doing 
 something. 
 
 She joined devoutly in the General Confession: 
 
 "Almighty and most merciful Father; we have 
 erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. 
 
226 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 We have followed too much the devices and desires 
 of our own hearts. We have offended against thy 
 holy laws. We have left undone those things which 
 we ought to have done ..." 
 
 Mrs. W. Barnabas Norton is a busy woman, and 
 Maud had been a bad girl.