are
convinced that every laborious life is more worthy of respect than an
idle life,--who are convinced of this, and who live in conformity with
this belief, and who in conformity with this conviction value and respect
people? If I had thought of this, I might have understood that neither
I, nor any other person among my acquaintances, could heal this
complaint.

I might have understood that these amazed and affected heads thrust over
the partition indicated only surprise at the sympathy expressed for them,
but not in the least a hope of reclamation from their dissolute life.
They do not perceive the immorality of their life. They see that they
are despised and cursed, but for what they are thus despised they cannot
comprehend. Their life, from childhood, has been spent among just such
women, who, as they very well know, always have existed, and are
indispensable to society, and so indispensable that there are
governmental officials to attend to their legal existence. Moreover,
they know that they have power over men, and can bring them into
subjection, and rule them often more than other women. They see that
their position in society is recognized by women and men and the
authorities, in spite of their continual curses, and therefore, they
cannot understand why they should reform.

In the course of one of the tours, one of the students told me that in a
certain lodging, there was a woman who was bargaining for her thirteen-
year-old daughter. Being desirous of rescuing this girl, I made a trip
to that lodging expressly. Mother and daughter were living in the
greatest poverty. The mother, a small, dark-complexioned, dissolute
woman of forty, was not only homely, but repulsively homely. The
daughter was equally disagreeable. To all my pointed questions about
their life, the mother responded curtly, suspiciously, and in a hostile
way, evidently feeling that I was an enemy, with evil intentions; the
daughter made no reply, did not look at her mother, and evidently trusted
the latter fully. They inspired me with no sincere pity, but rather with
disgust. But I made up my mind that the daughter must be rescued, and
that I would interest ladies who pitied the sad condition of these women,
and send them hither. But if I had reflected on the mother's long life
in the past, of how she had given birth to, nursed and reared this
daughter in her situation, assuredly without the slightest assistance
from outsiders, and