th two or three drinks, often with only one. The
most marked change was that never by any chance did she become
gay; the sky over her life was steadily gray--gray or black, to
gray again--never lighter.

How far she had fallen! But swift descent or gradual, she had
adapted herself--had, in fact, learned by much experience of
disaster to mitigate the calamities, to have something to keep
a certain deep-lying self of selfs intact--unaffected by what
she had been forced to undergo. It seemed to her that if she
could get the chance--or could cure herself of the blindness
which was always preventing her from seeing and seizing the
chance that doubtless offered again and again--she could shed
the surface her mode of life had formed over her and would find
underneath a new real surface, stronger, sightly, better able
to bear--like the skin that forms beneath the healing wound.

In these tenements, as in all tenements of all degrees, she and
the others of her class were fiercely resented by the heads of
families where there was any hope left to impel a striving
upward. She had the best furnished room in the tenement. She
was the best dressed woman--a marked and instantly recognizable
figure because of her neat and finer clothes. Her profession
kept alive and active the instincts for care of the person that
either did not exist or were momentary and feeble in the
respectable women. The slovenliness, the scurrilousness of
even the wives and daughters of the well-to-do and the rich of
that region would not have been tolerated in any but the lowest
strata of her profession, hardly even in those sought by men of
the laboring class. Also, the deep horror of disease, which
her intelligence never for an instant permitted to relax its
hold, made her particular and careful when in other
circumstances drink might have reduced her to squalor. She
spent all her leisure time--for she no longer read--in the care
of her person.

She was watched with frightened, yet longing and curious, eyes
by all the girls who were at work. The mothers hated her; many
of them spat upon the ground after she had passed. It was a
heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their
daughters, not from prostitution, not from living with men
outside marriage, not from moral danger, but from the practical
danger, the danger of bringing into the world children with no
father to help feed and clothe them. In the opinion of these
people--an