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frankness and clear insight can help the daughters of the community.

The whole play contains the sad story of two girls. There is Nell.
What happened to her? She is the daughter of a respectable banker in a
small town. A scoundrel, a commercial white slaver, a typical Broadway
"cadet" with luring manners, goes to the small town, finds access to
the church parlours, is introduced to the girl, and after some
courtship he elopes with her and makes her believe that they are
correctly married. After the fraudulent marriage with a falsified
license he brings her into a metropolitan disorderly house and holds
her there by force. Of course this is brutal stage exaggeration, but
even if this impossibility were true, what conclusion are we to draw,
and what advice are we to give? Does it mean that in future a young
girl who meets a nice chap in the church socials of her native town
ought to keep away from him, because she ought all the time to think
that he might be a delegate of a Broadway brothel? To fill a girl with
suspicions in a case like that of Nell would be no wiser than to tell
the ordinary man that he ought not to deposit his earnings in any
bank, because the cashier might run away with it. To be sure, it would
have been better if Nell had not eloped, but is there any knowledge of
sexual questions which would have helped her to a wiser decision? On
the contrary, she said she did elope because her life in the small
town was so uninteresting, and she felt so lonely and was longing for
the life of love. She knew all which was to be known then, and if
there had been any power to hold her back from the foolish elopement
it could have been only a kind of instinctive respect for the
traditional demands of society, that kind of respect which grows up
from the policy of silence and is trampled to the ground by the policy
of loud talk.

The other girl in the play is Sylvia. Her fate is very different. She
needs melodramatic money for her sick mother. Her earnings in the
department store are not enough. The sly owner of a treacherous
employment agency has given her a card over the counter, advising her
to come there, when she needs extra employment. The agency keeps open
in the evening. She tells her mother that she will seek some extra
work there. The mother warns her that there are so many traps for
decent girls, and she answers that she is not afraid and that she will
be on the lookout. She goes there, and the skilful o