sons she had drunk that she had satisfactory
results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest
period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her
profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the
imagination. Opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene,
into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. The world she had
been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur
the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant
thing seen in a dream. Her opium world became the vivid reality.

The life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had
hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad,
shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a
thousand mercenary and lustful kisses. The opium soon changed
all this. Her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of
the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an
ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop.
Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes
looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without
ceasing upon an altar to the god of dreams. Never had she been
so beautiful; never had she been so happy--not with the coarser
happiness of dancing eye and laughing lip, but with the ecstasy
of soul that is like the shimmers of a tranquil sea quivering
rhythmically under the caresses of moonlight.

In her descent she had now reached that long narrow shelf along
which she would walk so long as health and looks should
last--unless some accident should topple her off on the one
side into suicide or on the other side into the criminal
prostitute class. And such accidents were likely to happen.
Still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until
loss of looks and loss of health--the end of the shelf--should
drop her abruptly to the very bottom. She could guess what was
there. Every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and
most forlorn of its wretched and forlorn things, the solitary
old women, bent and twisted, wrapped in rotting rags, picking
papers and tobacco from the gutters and burrowing in garbage
barrels, seeking somehow to get the drink or the dope that
changed hell into heaven for them.

Despite liquor and opium and the degradations of the
street-woman's life she walked that narrow ledge with curious
steadiness. She was unconscious of the cause. Indeed,
self-consciousness had never been one of her traits. The cause
i