at they thinks don't know as much as they does. They don't relish
being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get
acquainted with. Now I'm talking to you just as if you was one of my
own. You may think you are wise, and all that,--and you are a bright
sort of girl, I'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked
city. A young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when
she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be
willing to lead her off. This is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you
got to be mighty careful about yourself. Forewarned is forearmed, as
you've heard tell before; and I have saw so many young girls go wrong
that I felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked
straight at them in the beginning, like I'm talking here to you. I had a
girl here in this house two years agone. A pretty girl she was, and she
was from the country too. Somewheres up in Connecticut she come from.
She was a nice, innocent girl too, so she was, when she come here to
rent a room. This very room you've got was the one she had. Just as
quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she
was. She worked down in St. Mark's Place. She was a cap-maker and got
four dollars a week. She started out to live honest, for she'd been
brought up decent. Her father, she told me when she come here, was a
blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. She thought
she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she
could have a fine time; and I guess she was terrible disappointed when
she found just how things really was. She hankered for fine clothes and
to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four
dollars a week. By and by, though, she did get to going out some with a
young fellow that worked where she did. He was a nice, decent young
fellow, and I'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted
wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. I
don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and I say that when a
young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just
says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he
don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of
her to begin with. That's what, I think, started this girl going wrong.
At first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the
theater, but by and