s to justify herself with the
excuse that the money she earns is needed for the support of some one
dependent upon her, thus following habits established by generations of
virtuous women who cared for feeble folk. I know one such girl living in
a disreputable house in Chicago who has adopted a delicate child
afflicted with curvature of the spine, whom she boards with respectable
people and keeps for many weeks out of each year in an expensive
sanitarium that it may receive medical treatment. The mother of the
child, an inmate of the house in which the ardent foster-mother herself
lives, is quite indifferent to the child's welfare and also rather
amused at such solicitude. The girl has persevered in her course for
five years, never however allowing the little invalid to come to the
house in which she and the mother live. The same sort of devotion and
self-sacrifice is often poured out upon the miserable man who in the
beginning was responsible for the girl's entrance into the life and who
constantly receives her earnings. She supports him in the luxurious life
he may be living in another part of the town, takes an almost maternal
pride in his good clothes and general prosperity, and regards him as the
one person in all the world who understands her plight.

Most of the cases of economic responsibility, however, are not due to
chivalric devotion, but arise from a desire to fulfill family
obligations such as would be accepted by any conscientious girl. This
was clearly revealed in conversations which were recently held with
thirty-four girls, who were living at the same time in a rescue home,
when twenty-two of them gave economic pressure as the reason for
choosing the life which they had so recently abandoned. One piteous
little widow of seventeen had been supporting her child and had been
able to leave the life she had been leading only because her married
sister offered to take care of the baby without the money formerly paid
her. Another had been supporting her mother and only since her recent
death was the girl sure that she could live honestly because she had
only herself to care for.

The following story, fairly typical of the twenty-two involving economic
reasons, is of a girl who had come to Chicago at the age of fifteen,
from a small town in Indiana. Her father was too old to work and her
mother was a dependent invalid. The brother who cared for the parents,
with the help of the girl's own slender wages earned i