ough."

It was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos
she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and Ruth
conspiring to take Sam away from her.

What a world! If only these shifting, usually evil winds of
circumstance could be made to blow good!

A few evenings after the arrest Maud came for Susan, persuaded
her to go out. They dined at about the only good restaurant
where unescorted women were served after nightfall. Afterward
they went "on duty." It was fine overhead and the air was
cold and bracing--one of those marvelous New York winter nights
which have the tonic of both sea and mountains and an
exhilaration, in addition, from the intense bright-burning life
of the mighty city. For more than a week there had been a
steady downpour of snow, sleet and finally rain. Thus, the
women of the streets had been doing almost no business. There
was not much money in sitting in drinking halls and the back
rooms of saloons and picking up occasional men; the best trade
was the men who would not venture to show themselves in such
frankly disreputable places, but picked out women in the
crowded streets and followed them to quiet dark places to make
the arrangements--men stimulated by good dinners, or, later on,
in the evening, those who left parties of elegant
respectability after theater or opera. On this first night of
business weather in nearly two weeks the streets were crowded
with women and girls. They were desperately hard up and they
made open dashes for every man they could get at. All classes
were made equally bold--the shop and factory and office and
theater girls with wages too small for what they regarded as a
decent living; the women with young children to support and
educate; the protected professional regulars; the miserable
creatures who had to get along as best they could without
protection, and were prey to every blackmailing officer of an
anti-vice society and to every policeman and fly-cop not above
levying upon women who were "too low to be allowed to live,
anyhow." Out from all kinds of shelters swarmed the women who
were demonstrating how prostitution flourishes and tends to
spread to every class of society whenever education develops
tastes beyond the earning power of their possessors. And with
clothes and food to buy, rent to pay, dependents to support,
these women, so many days hampered in the one way that was open
to them to get money, made the most piteous ap