rs they were crowding into, rush with
them for the elevated trains, or follow them across the river and see
them disappear into boarding-house and rooming-house, those hot, crowded
places waiting to receive them after the hot, crowded day. Sometimes she
would go for lunch to the places she saw them going to--always searching,
and as she searched, wondering, and as she wondered, sorrowing.

She came to know of many things: of "dates"--vulgar enough affairs many
of them appeared to be. But she no longer dismissed them with that. She
always wondered now if the sordid-looking adventure might not be at heart
the divine adventure. Things which she would at one time have called
"common" and turned from as such she brooded over now as sorry expression
of a noble thing. And then she would go home to her friends at night and
sometimes they would seem the moving-picture show--their pleasures and
standards--the whole of their lives. And she sorrowed that where there
was setting for loveliness the setting itself should so many times absorb
it all, and that out on the city's streets that tender fluttering of life
for life, divine yearning for joy that joy might give again to life,
should find so many paths to that abyss where joy could be not and where
the life of life must go. There were days which showed all too brutally
that many were "called" and few were saved.

Thus had she passed the summer, and thus it happened that she did not
have in September all the freshness and the gladness that had been her
charm in May.

Though to the man waiting for her that afternoon she had another and a
finer charm. Life had taken something from her, but she had wrested
something from life.

"I could have had a job," she said, and smiled.

But the smile was soon engulfed. "And there was a girl who needed it, she
told me how she was 'up against it,' and through some caprice she didn't
get it. Needing it doesn't seem to make a bit of difference. If anything,
it works the other way."

She had read in the paper that morning that the chorus was to be "tried
out" for a new musical comedy. Thinking that Ann, too, might have read
that in the paper, she went.

She had been seeing something of chorus girls as well as shop girls. She
went to all the musical comedies and sat far front and kept her glasses
on the chorus. More than once she had stood near stage doors as they
were coming out. Seeing them so, they were not a group of chorus girls;
they we