these girls: its
hard work and unrelenting poverty; its cheerlessness; the absence of any
fun; the irresistible allurement of the flashily-dressed stranger who
jingles money in his pocket and offers to "show a good time." Then he
told a typical story, the story of a little girl he knew, who worked in
a department store for three dollars and a half a week, and whose
drunken father took over the last cent of that every Saturday night.
This girl's name was Eva Bernheimer, and she was sixteen years old and
"in trouble."

"You know what, Doc?" Buck ended. "You'd ought to take it up in the
_Post_--that's what. There's a fine piece to be written, showin' up them
little hunters."

It was characteristic of Doctor Queed that such an idea had not and
would not have occurred to him: applying his new science of editorial
writing to a practical problem dipped from the stream of everyday life
was still rather beyond him. But it was also characteristic of him that,
once the idea had been suggested to him, he instantly perceived its
value. He looked at Buck admiringly through the iron bars.

"You are quite right. There is."

"You know they are trying to get up a reformatory--girls' home, some
call it. That's all right, if you can't do better, but it don't get to
the bottom of it. The right way with a thing like this is to _take it
before it happens!_"

"You are quite right, Buck."

"Yes--but how're you goin' to do it? You sit up here all day and night
with your books and studies, Doc--where's your cure for a sorry trouble
like this?"

"That is a fair question. I cannot answer definitely until I have
studied the situation out in a practical way. But I will say that the
general problem is one of the most difficult with which social science
has to deal."

"I know what had ought to be done. The blaggards ought to be shot. Damn
every last one of them, I say."

Klinker conversed in his anger something like the ladies of
Billingsgate, but Queed did not notice this. He sat back in his chair,
absorbedly thinking that here, at all events, was a theme which had
enough practical relation with life. He himself had seen a group of the
odious "mashers" with his own eyes; Buck had pointed them out as they
walked up. Never had a social problem come so close home to him as this:
not a thing of text-book theories, but a burning issue working out
around the corner on people that Klinker knew. And Klinker's question
had been an acute one, chall