iss Randall, "as long as economic
conditions set the stage for it. A young girl housed in a poor tenement,
ill-lighted, poorly heated, badly ventilated, fed and clothed
insufficiently--see to it that she hears foul language, and witnesses
drunkenness and quarrelling--then you have the condition that produces
the delinquent city girl."

"We are attacking all those evils," said Ambrose. "The public conscience
is rising against them. I predict the time when it will be regarded as
great a disgrace for a city to possess a 'back of the yards,' a ghetto or
a slum tenement district as it is now to have a district organized for
the exploitation of women. It's coming. You and I shall see it."

Mary Randall had risen, deeply moved while he spoke. She leaned against
the trellis and gazed far across the silver-shot lake at the sun sinking,
a great ball of crimson fire among the dark trees.

"God speed the day!" she said.

Beyond the veranda in a darkened drawing-room Mary Randall's aunt had
been resting and had heard this conversation. She rose and went softly
away and out to a pergola where she found her husband smoking a cigar.

"Lucius," she said. "That young newspaper man who has been out here to
see Mary is here again. They are talking in the veranda, settling all the
problems of Chicago!"

Lucius Randall blew a cloud of smoke. "Well, my dear, that is the only
way this old world gets ahead, for each generation to tackle its problems
anew."

"I believe that young man likes Mary."

"Many young men do."

"But--I really believe Mary likes him. She talks to him with a sweet note
in her voice, even when they are discussing the most impossible
subjects."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Lucius Randall with much serenity.

AFTERWORD

In our modern crusade against that most ancient evil known as the white
slave traffic we have made at least one serious advance. All over the
world that conspiracy of silence which has fettered thought and prevented
open action in the fight is ended.

Nowadays, as Havelock Ellis, author of the famous "Psychology of Sex,"
says in the _Metropolitan_ discussion of this subject, "churches,
societies, journalist, legislators, have all joined the ranks of the
agitators. Not only has there been no voice on the opposite side, which
was scarcely to be expected--for there has never been any anxiety to cry
aloud in defense of 'white slavery' from the housetops--but t