on
toward each, "have given me permission to speak to you today for five
minutes, because I want to ask the Santa Paloma Women's Club a favor--a
great favor, in fact. I won't say how much I hope the club will decide
to grant it, but just tell you what it is. It has to do with the
factory girls across the river. I've become interested in some of them;
partly I suppose because some friends of mine are working for just such
girls, only under infinitely harder circumstances, in some of the
eastern cities, I feel, we all feel, I know, that the atmosphere of Old
Paloma is a dangerous one for girls. Every year certain ones among them
'go wrong,' as the expression is; and when a girl once does that, she
is apt to go very wrong indeed before she stops. She doesn't care what
she does, in fact, and her own people only make it harder, practically
drive her away. Or even if she marries decently, and tries to live down
all the past it comes up between her and her neighbors, between her and
her children, perhaps, and embitters her whole life. And so finally she
goes to join that terrible army of women that we others try to pretend
we never see or hear of at all. These girls work hard all day, and
their homes aren't the right sort of homes, with hot dirty rooms,--full
of quarreling and crowding; and so they slip out at night and meet
their friends in the dancehalls, and the moving-picture shows. And
we--we can't blame them." Her voice had grown less diffident, and rang
with sudden longing and appeal. "They want only what we all wanted a
few years ago," she said. "They want good times, lights and music, and
pretty gowns, something to look forward to in the long, hot
afternoons--dances, theatricals, harmless meetings of all sorts. If we
could give them safe clean fun--not patronizingly, and not too
obviously instructive--they'd be willing to wait for it; they'd talk
about it instead of more dangerous things; they'd give up dangerous
things for it. They are very nice girls, some of them, and their
friends are very nice fellows, for the most part, and they are--they
are so very young.

"However, about the club--I am wondering if it could be borrowed for a
temporary meeting-place for them, if we form a sort of club among them.
I say temporary, because I hope we will build them a clubhouse of their
own some day. But meantime there is only the Grand Opera House, which
all the traveling theatrical companies rent; Hansen's Hall, which is
over