y explanation, and that given by way of
apology, which could be extracted from her. When we discovered that
there had been no marriage ceremony, that there were no living
children, that she had twice narrowly escaped losing her life, it
seemed a simple matter to insist that the relation should be broken
off. She apathetically remained at Hull-House for a few weeks, but
when her strength had somewhat returned, when her lover began to
recover from his prolonged debauch of whiskey and opium, she insisted
upon going home every day to prepare his meals and to see that the
little tenement was clean and comfortable because "Pierre is always so
sick and weak after one of those long ones." This of course meant that
she was drifting back to him, and when she was at last restrained by
that moral compulsion, by that overwhelming of another's will which is
always so ruthlessly exerted by those who are conscious that virtue is
struggling with vice, her mind gave way and she became utterly
distraught.

A poor little Ophelia, I met her one night wandering in the hall half
dressed in the tawdry pink gown "that Pierre liked best of all" and
groping on the blank wall to find the door which might permit her to
escape to her lover. In a few days it was obvious that hospital
restraint was necessary, but when she finally recovered we were
obliged to admit that there is no civic authority which can control
the acts of a girl of eighteen. From the hospital she followed her
heart directly back to Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of
the Hull-House neighborhood. We knew later that he had degraded the
poor child still further by obliging her to earn money for his drugs
by that last method resorted to by a degenerate man to whom a woman's
devotion still clings.

It is inevitable that a force which is enduring enough to withstand
the discouragements, the suffering and privation of daily living,
strenuous enough to overcome and rectify the impulses which make for
greed and self-indulgence, should be able, even under untoward
conditions, to lift up and transfigure those who are really within
its grasp and set them in marked contrast to those who are merely
playing a game with it or using it for gain. But what has happened to
these wretched girls? Why has this beneficent current cast them upon
the shores of death and destruction when it should have carried them
into the safe port of domesticity? Through whose fault has this basic
emotion ser