urch is for those who
haven't been caught! God knows if there is a place for any one who has
been caught--and I've been caught and caught and caught." She cried.
"Only the children don't know--not yet, though little Tom--he's the
oldest, he came to me and asked me yesterday why the other children
yelled when I went out. Oh, hell--" she moaned, "what's the use--what's
the use--what's the use!" and fell to sobbing with her head upon her
arms resting upon the bare, dirty table.

It was rather a difficult question for John Dexter. Only one other
minister in the world ever answered it successfully, and He brought
public opinion down on Him. The Rev. John Dexter rose, and stood looking
at the shattered thing that once had been a graceful, beautiful human
body enclosing an aspiring soul. He saw what society had done to break
and twist the body; what society had neglected to do in the youth of the
soul--to guide and environ it right--he saw what poverty had done and
what South Harvey had done to cheat her of her womanhood even when she
had tried to rise and sin no more; he remembered how the court-made law
had cheated her of her rightful patrimony and cast her into the streets
to spread the social cancer of her trade; and he had no answer. If he
could have put vanity into her heart--the vanity which he feared for
Grant Adams, he would have been glad. But her vanity was the vanity of
motherhood; for herself she had spent it all. So he left her without
answering her question. Money was all he could give her and money seemed
to him a kind of curse. Yet he gave it and gave all he had.

When she saw that he was gone, Violet fell upon the tumbled, unmade bed
and cried with all the vehemence of her unrestrained, shallow nature.
For she was sick and weary and hungry. She had given her last dollar to
a policeman the night before to keep from arrest. The oldest boy had
gone to school without breakfast. The little children were playing in
the street--they had begged food at the neighbors' and she had no heart
to stop them. At noon when little Tom came in he found his mother
sitting before a number of paper sacks upon the table waiting for him.
Then the family ate out of the sacks the cold meal she had bought at the
grocery store with John Dexter's money.

That night Violet shivered out into the cold over her usual route. She
was walking through the railroad yards in Magnus when suddenly she came
upon a man who dropped stealthily out of