It was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered
talks we had at night after we were in bed, that I learned this and
innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that
followed served to confirm.

To this home for working girls the waifs, the foundlings, came at all
sorts of tender years, came from God only knows where--I could never
find out exactly--some of them, perhaps, from city asylums, some from
the families upon which they had been left as an encumbrance. They came
as little children, and they went away as grown women. For them the home
was practically a prison. Locked in here from morning till night, week
in, week out, year after year, they were prisoners at all save certain
stated times when they were taken abroad for a walk under charge of the
matrons. In return for a scant education in the rudimentary branches,
and a very generous tuition in the drudgery of the kitchen, the laundry,
and the sewing-room, they received in all these years only their board
and clothes and a certain nominal protection against the vices and
corruptions of the street and the gutter from which they had been
snatched.

"You won't eat here?" Mrs. Lumley inquired as we were going down-stairs
again. To which I replied with a "Yes, why not? I have arranged with
Mrs. Pitbladder to do so."

We were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor.
She glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Pitbladder's door, into which a small
blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with
Mrs. Pitbladder's breakfast. When it had closed again, she looked at me
hesitatingly, as if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence.
Then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she
replied with a brief--

"I wouldn't, if I was you. You can't stand it."

"But I'll have to stand it," I returned; "I'm as poor as anybody here."

She shook her head. "But you couldn't work on it--you're not used to it.
I can see that. Besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. You'd
better go out. I wouldn't even eat here to-day. I wouldn't begin it.
There's a little lunch-room over on Third Avenue where you can get
enough to eat, and just as cheap as here."

The woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to
say urgent, that I felt instinctively that there was something more in
all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals
she warned me agains