owed to leave the
house. Furthermore, as one of the methods of retaining a reluctant girl
is to put her hopelessly in debt and always to charge against her the
expenses incurred in securing her, Marie as an imported girl had begun
at once with the huge debt of the ocean journey for Paret and herself.
In addition to this large sum she was charged, according to universal
custom, with exorbitant prices for all the clothing she received and
with any money which Paret chose to draw against her account. Later,
when Marie contracted typhoid fever, she was sent for treatment to a
public hospital and it was during her illness there, when a general
investigation was made of the white slave traffic, that a federal
officer visited her. Marie, who thought she was going to die, freely
gave her testimony, which proved to be most valuable.

The federal authorities following up her statements at last located
Paret in the city prison at Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been
convicted on a similar charge. He was brought to Chicago and on his
testimony Lair was also convicted and imprisoned.

Marie has since married a man who wishes to protect her from the
influence of her old life, but although not yet twenty years old and
making an honest effort, what she has undergone has apparently so far
warped and weakened her will that she is only partially successful in
keeping her resolutions, and she sends each month to her parents in
France ten or twelve dollars, which she confesses to have earned
illicitly. It is as if the shameful experiences to which this little
convent-bred Breton girl was forcibly subjected, had finally become
registered in every fibre of her being until the forced demoralization
has become genuine. She is as powerless now to save herself from her
subjective temptations as she was helpless five years ago to save
herself from her captors.

Such demoralization is, of course, most valuable to the white slave
trader, for when a girl has become thoroughly accustomed to the life and
testifies that she is in it of her own free will, she puts herself
beyond the protection of the law. She belongs to a legally degraded
class, without redress in courts of justice for personal outrages.

Marie, herself, at the end of her third year in America, wrote to the
police appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to her
letter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there of
her own volition and that therefore he co