elty stands just where it did, Mag, when you and I first saw it;
most things do in Philadelphia, you know. There's the same prim,
official straight up-and-downness about the brick front. The steps
don't look so steep now and the building's not so high, perhaps because
of a skyscraper or two that've gone up since. But it chills your
blood, Maggie darlin', just as it always did, to think what it stands
for. Not man's inhumanity to man, but women's cruelty to children!
Maggie, think of it, if you can, as though this were the first time
you'd heard of such a thing! Would you believe it?

I waked from that to find myself marching up the stairs behind the
Bishop's rigid little back. Oh, it was stiff and uncompromising!
Beryl Blackburn did that for me. Poor, pretty, pagan Beryl!

My coming with the Bishop--we seemed to come together, anyway--made the
people think he'd brought me, so I must be just all right. I had the
man bring in the toys I'd got out in the carriage, and I handed them
over to the matron, saying:

"They're for the children. I want them to have them all and now,
please, to do whatever they want with them. There'll always be others.
I'm going to send them right along, if you'll let me, so that those who
leave can take something of their very own with them--something that
never belonged to anybody else but just themselves, you understand.
It's terrible, don't you know, to be a deserted child or a tortured
child or a crippled child and have nothing to do but sit up in that
bare, clean little room upstairs with a lot of other strangelings--and
just think on the cruelty that's brought you here and the cruelty you
may get into when you leave here. If I'd had a doll--if Mag had only
had a set of dishes or a little tin kitchen--if the boy with the gouged
eye could have had a set of tools--oh, can't you understand--"

I became conscious then that the matron--a new one, Mag, ours is
gone--was staring at me, and that the people stood around listening as
though I'd gone mad.

Who came to my rescue? Why, the Bishop, like the manly little fellow
he is. He forgave me even Beryl in that moment.

"It's Nance Olden, ladies," he said, with a dignified little wave of
his hand that served for an introduction. "She begins her Philadelphia
engagement to-night in And the Greatest of These."

Oh, I'm used to it now, Maggie, but I do like it. All the lady-swells
buzzed about me, and there Nance stood preening herse