to her life an element of
sullenness and of despair. Perhaps this added depth to her dissipation,
but it took away from it all quality of joy as well as of peace. If her
sensuality and her despair had been all there was in her, or if these
had constituted her main characteristics, this story would never have
been written. Perhaps another tale might have been told, but it would
have been the story of a submerged class, not prostitutes, white slaves;
and then it would have been the story of a submerged class, not of an
individual temperament.

What was it that kept Marie in all really essential ways out of this
class of social victims? It was because, in the first place, of the fact
that her nature demanded something better than what the life of the
prostitute afforded. And it was natural that the greater quality of
personality that she possessed should attract the kind of love and
social support needed essentially to justify to herself her instincts.
When she was very young Marie secured the genuine love of two strong and
remarkable personalities; and at a later time, there gathered about
these three, other people who enlarged the group, which gave to each
member of it the social support needed to remove essential despair and
desperate self-disapproval.

One of these two persons so necessary to Marie's larger life was a woman
whom she had met several years previous to this point in the story.

This woman was a cook, Katie by name. She was born in Germany, and her
young girlhood was spent in the old country. She had only a rudimentary
education, and even now speaks broken English. But she was endowed with
a healthy, independent nature, a spontaneous wit, and a strong demand to
take care of something and to love.

As natural as a young dog, she never thought of resisting a normal
impulse. Her life as a girl in Germany was as free and untrammelled as a
happy breeze. She lived in a little garrison town in the South, and the
German soldiers did no essential harm to her and the other young girls
of the place. These things were deemed laws of nature in her community.
What would have been dreadful harm to a young American girl was only an
occasional moment of anxiety to her. It never occurred to her that it
was possible to resist a man. "I had to," she said, very simply, and did
not seem to regret it any more than that she was compelled to eat. She
is also very fond of her food.

She came to America and worked as cook in pr