The eastern end of Rivington Street is a hectic thoroughfare. Often
it is so hectic as to be no thoroughfare at all, but only a tossing
fever-dream, a whirling phantasmagoria of noisy shadows, grotesque
and reasonless. It seems a street with a bad conscience, for it
never sleeps.
The dawn, even in summertime, hesitates long before it comes
shivering up from the crowded East River to drop a few grudged rays
of anæmic light on Rivington Street. Already, out of the humming
courts, the black alleys, and the foul passages that feed this avenue
as gutters feed a sewer, a long funeral procession of little
handcarts has groped its way and taken a mournful stand beside the
fetid curbs; and soon, pausing at these carts to buy the rank morsels
of breakfast that there is never time to eat at home, the gray army
of the workers begins to scurry westward.
First come the market-laborers, with shoulders bowed and muscles
cramped from the bearing of many burdens. Upon their heels march the
pale conscripts of the sweatshops, their hands shaking, their cheeks
sunken, their eyes hot from loss of sleep. Follow the sad-lipped
factory-girls, women before their time, old women before their youth,
and then the long line of predestined shop-clerks, most of them still
in short skirts and all of them, befittingly, in mourning-black.
Swiftly they go, the whole corps of them, the whole corps strangely
silent.
The street is not emptied of them before it is filled again, now by
solemn children on their way to school, children whose gaze is fixed,
whose mouths are maturely set, and whose voices, when they are heard
at all, are high, strident, nervous. As these go by, the shops begin
to do business: the cheap food-shops, the old-clothes shops, the
shops that sell second-hand five-cent novels for a copper, and the
pawnbrokers'. The shawl-hooded housewives clutter in and out,
selling first that they may buy afterward, and continuing like ants
swarming about an ant-hill until noon strikes and the children parade
stolidly away from school for luncheon, and back again.
At that hour the underworld of Rivington Street enough recovers from
its drunkenness of the night preceding to stagger forth and drink
again. The doors of the shouldering saloons swing open and bang shut
in a running accompaniment, and the highway rocks with it until a
cloud of clattering two-wheeled push-carts swoops from "The Push-Cart
Garage" around the corner and alights as if it were a plague of
pestilent flies. Bearded Jews propel these, Jews with shining
derbies far back upon their heads, who work sometimes for themselves,
but more often for the owners of the push-cart trust, who squabble
for positions in the gutter where an impotent law forbids any of them
long to remain, but where, once entrenched, they stand for hours,
selling stockings at five cents and shirts at ten, mirrors and
vegetables, suspenders and lithographs, shoestrings and
picture-postcards, collars of linen and celluloid, all sorts of cheap
dress-material, every description of brush, fruit, and cigar-butts.
The carts are end-to-end now; one could walk upon them from
cross-street to cross-street. Each has its separate gasoline torch
leaping up, in flame and smoke, to the descending darkness. Upon
them charge the returning army of workers. The crowd is all moving
eastward; you could not make six yards of progress to the west; the
sidewalks overflow, the street is filled. The silence of the morning
has changed to a mad chorus of discords. The thousand weary feet
shuffle, the venders shriek their wares; there is every imaginable
sound of strife and traffic, but there is no distinguishable note of
mirth. Wagons jostle pedestrians, graze children, are blocked, held
up, turned away. The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can
hold no more, and still it must hold more and more.
Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise
lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen.
Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes
somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at
a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the
small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a
troubled sigh, to a restless doze.
But to doze only. Its bad conscience will grant it no absolute
oblivion, no perfect rest, however brief. Cats yell from the dizzy
edges of the lower roofs; dogs howl from the doorsteps. Back in the
narrow courts and alleys and passages, drunken battles are won and
lost. The elevated cars roar out the minutes through the nocturnal
distances. An ambulance clangs into a byway street. A patrol-wagon
clatters past. Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch,
and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show
themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and
go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps
shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.
Into this street--into its noisiest quarter at its noisiest time--the
cab that bore Violet on her way to liberty at last turned and
proceeded as far under the flaring gasoline torches as the evening
crowd of workers, buyers, and sellers, would permit. The girl,
through the dark thoroughfares that had preceded it, had answered a
score of questions, which Dyker had asked her, the fever of escape
beating high in her breast and tossing ready replies to her heated
lips; but now, in the roar and brilliance of Rivington Street's
nocturnal traffic, there had come upon her a terror almost equal to
that which had assailed her when, with Max for her guide, the lighted
length of East Fourteenth Street had first unrolled itself before
her. The city was again an inimical monster awaiting her descent
from the cab, and the newly acquired habit of seclusion, the habit of
the prisoner, recoiled upon her. Freedom was strange; it became
awesome, and when the horse was stopped and Violet knew that she must
soon fare alone, she cowered in a corner, breathing hard.
"Can't go no furder, boss," said the cabby, leaning far around from
his seat. "Where to now?"
"Nowhere right away," answered Dyker. "Just stand where you are for
a minute."
Then he turned to Violet.
"Now," he said, not unkindly, "I'm afraid I'll have to drop you here.
It wouldn't do for me to figure publicly as an active agent in this
case, you know. But you needn't worry. Just get out and walk to the
next corner. Turn to your right, take the next cross-street to your
left, go up the first narrow street you come to, and your friend's
house ought to be about the third in the row. It will be a little
dark, but you won't have any trouble finding it."
Violet hesitated.
"I hope I won't," she said.
"Surely not. If you have, just ask the way of the first policeman
you see."
"Not a policeman, Mr. Dyker!"
"Of course, a policeman. He won't hurt you as long as you keep your
cloak tight. Now, you're sure you've given me the right address?"
"I gave you the one the man gave me."
"Yes, but I mean you're not lying to me?"
Violet's wide eyes should have been sufficient denial.
"Why would I do that?" she asked.
"That's so; only I thought--well, I beg your pardon, Violet. You
have my office-address on that card. I'll send for you in a day or
two--be sure to be home every afternoon--and then we'll fix Madame
Rose with the District-Attorney.--Good-by. Sure you're not afraid?"
Her gratitude would not permit her to acknowledge fear.
"Not afraid," she smiled, rather grimly.
"Then remember: the first street to your right, the next to your
left, and then to your right again--third or fourth house in the row."
He opened the cab-door and alighted, holding out his hand.
She straightened her beaver hat, drew the folds of her dark cloak
tightly over the betraying crimson of her kimona, and, helped by his
grasp, followed him to the swarming curb.
"I--I don't know how to thank you," she said.
"Then don't try," returned Dyker, laughing easily. "You can make it
all right with me when you testify against Rose."
She kept his hand a moment longer, partly in fear of the human
multitude about her and partly in genuine gratitude.
"But I do thank you," she said.
Dyker, not too well liking the white light of publicity in which this
little scene was being enacted, pressed her hand and dropped it.
"That's all right," he responded. "Just don't forget your promise."
He stepped back into the cab. "Good-by, and good luck," he said.
"Good-by," he heard her answer, and then, with his head out of the
cab-window, he saw her pause bewilderedly. "To your right," he
cautioned.
He watched her turn. He saw her plunge into the crowd. He saw the
crowd swallow her up.
"Take me over to my office," he ordered the driver, and added his
address.
Once there, he dismissed the cab, climbed the steps of what seemed an
old and modest little house, and, opening the door and turning into
the front room, lit a gas-jet the flame of which revealed an
apartment surprisingly new and arrogant. The walls were lined with
new bookcases holding rows of new law-books, and surrounded by rows
of new chairs. The flat-top desk in the center, at which his
stenographer sat by daylight, was a new desk, with new wire-baskets
upon it, and a new telephone, to which Dyker now immediately
proceeded and called a number.
"Hello," he said into the transmitter, adopting the low tone that he
always used in his wired conversations. "Is that Schleger's?--It
is?--That you, Ludwig?--This is Dyker.--Yes, good-evening,
Ludwig.--Yes, pretty good, thank you. How are you, and how's
business?--That's good. Mrs. Schleger and the babies all
right?--I'll bet that boy's gained three pounds!--He has? I'm glad
to hear it. You're a wonder.--Yes.--That's what I said. And, say,
Ludwig, is O'Malley anywhere around?--He isn't?--Hasn't been in this
evening?--Oh! Well, I wonder where I can find him.--You don't?
Perhaps he's at Dugan's place.--No, it's not anything important: I
just wanted to take a drink with him, that's all. He's sure to be at
Dugan's or Venturio's, but I guess I won't bother. Ever so much
obliged, Ludwig.--Good-by."
In spite of his word, Dyker did, however, bother. He called three
other numbers in his quest of the political boss, and when he found
him, the underling made a pressing appointment for an important
conference on the next morning, though what it was that he wanted
then to discuss he carefully neglected to mention over a
telephone-wire.
He hung up the receiver in a glow of satisfaction.
"And now," he said, "I think I'll get away for the night. I don't
care to have any arguments with Rose for a day or two."
Yet, even as he said it, the telephone-bell uttered its staccato
summons. He stood uncertainly beside the desk.
"She wouldn't have the nerve to use the wire," he argued. "Perhaps
it's O'Malley with more to say."
Again the bell rang, and his curiosity overcame his caution. He took
up the receiver.
"Hello!" he said sharply, and then his tone mellowed, for the voice
that came to him across the hurrying New York night was the voice of
Marian Lennox.
"Is that Mr. Dyker's office?" it asked.
"It is the head of the firm himself," he answered, "and mighty glad
to hear from you."
"I am glad you're glad," the voice pursued, "because I want to ask a
favor."
"It is as good as performed. What is it?"
"I have been down town, and remained longer than I intended, and I
want you, please, to take me home."
"I thought you were asking a favor, not bestowing one. Where are
you?"
"At the settlement."
"In Rivington Street?" Wesley set his teeth as he asked it.
"Yes."
"Very well, I'll be over right away."
He rang off and left the office. He was sorry that he had dismissed
the cab, for he expected to need it when he reached the first stage
of his journey; but the way was not long to the place that Marian had
named, and, even had it been twice as far to the settlement, Dyker,
who walked thither with the feet of chagrin, would not have remarked
the distance.
In the midst of Rivington Street, in a house that used, long ago, to
be a Methodist parsonage, a little group of devoted women are doing
their best to redeem, by social activities, the people of the
neighborhood from the benighted condition in which the people's lot
is cast. This best has now been done for more years than a few, and
the people, still considering it necessary to remain alive, and still
knowing that to remain alive they must submit to the economic system
imposed upon them, continue discouragingly unredeemed. But the
devoted women, though they neglect the disease for its symptoms,
persist as only feminine natures can persist.
They are college-bred women with the limitations and emancipations of
their class; and they have a great deal to occupy their attention
besides their essays in social entertainment. For the most part they
pass their days in really practical investigation. One of them will
inspect the public schools and impartially consider curricula and
ventilation. Another will visit tenements and ask housewives
personal questions for the tabular benefit of the Russell Sage
Foundation. A third goes into the laundries of the best hotels and
finds that these hostelries force their washerwomen to sleep twenty
in a room. Yet, when they return to Rivington Street, these daylight
investigators spur their wearied nerves to further exertion and go
forward, not to teach the toilers the practical cause and remedy of
the economic evil, but to form the boys and girls, the young women
and young men, into reading groups, debating clubs, sewing circles,
cooking classes, and elocutionary juntas. Their zeal is boundless,
their martyrdom sadly genuine, and, if there is humor, there is
something more than humor in their ultimate complaint:
"Some of our people we retain, but most of them slip away, and, even
with the best of fortune, we seem, somehow, able to do so little."
Dyker knew the place by reputation. He had always scorned it for its
own sake, and now he had come to hate it for Marian's. For want of a
better term, it may be repeated that he was in love with Marian.
Moreover, he wished the assistance that an early marriage with the
daughter of a wealthy department-store owner would give him in the
coming campaign. And, finally, his peculiar legal activities were
already well enough known on the East Side to make it probable that
any young woman entering the settlement would speedily learn of them.
After the night of the opera his cooler reflection had rejected
Marian's plan of joining the Rivington Street colony as a fervently
girlish dream destined to fade before the reality of action. He had
decided that the best way to aid its dissipation was no longer to
combat it, and he had even, during the months that had followed, seen
Marian but rarely, and never alone. Occupied with politics and
knowing the tactical value of restraint, he had not so much as
pressed his wooing. He had relied upon what he chose to describe as
his sweetheart's basic commonsense to work out their common
salvation, and had decided that, this commonsense being what he
esteemed it, Marian was a woman more likely to be won by a Fabian
campaign than by a Varric attack.
The point wherein these calculations erred was their underestimation
of the momentum of a girlish impulse. That method of consideration
which makes one slow to reach convictions works beyond the
convictions and retards one from action upon them, once they are
achieved, but the impulsive mind that bolts a creed unmasticated
straightway drives its owner, in the creed's behalf, to the
thumbscrews or the wrack. It is from the pods of half-baked opinions
that there is shaken the seed of the church: Marian meant to keep to
her purpose.
Perhaps Wesley's silence and the subtle sense of pique that it
awakened played a part in this; perhaps the purpose was
self-sufficient; but, in either case, Marian missed scarcely an
evening at the settlement. Two of her former classmates were
knee-deep in the work there, and what she saw and what they told her
served only to confirm her. It thus happened that, anxious again to
see him alone, and more anxious to let him know the endurance of her
resolution, she had, on this evening, telephoned on the chance of
finding him late at his office.
"Good heavens!" he gasped as she met him at the settlement's door.
"What on earth are you doing in this part of town at this hour of the
night? Let me 'phone for a taxi."
What, as a matter of fact, she had been doing was to listen to slim
little Luigi Malatesta and fat little Morris Binderwitz respectively
attacking and defending the proposition that Abraham Lincoln was a
greater American than George Washington; but what she thought she had
been doing was assisting in raising the lower half of society. Under
this impression, her fine brown eyes shone with the consciousness of
moral rectitude, her mouth was even more than usually firm, and her
head even more than usually like some delicate cameo.
"One thing at a time, please," she imperturbably answered. "First,
no taxicab. It isn't far to Second Avenue, which is quiet enough,
and I want to walk for a few blocks."
She took the arm that he grimly offered, and he began to break his
way through the noisy crowd under the flaring gasoline lamps of the
push-carts. Coherent conversation was at first impossible, but Dyker
felt a glow of pride as, with her fingers closed in tight trust upon
him, he shouldered a passage for her, and Marian herself was not
insusceptible to the thrill inherent in the situation. Nevertheless,
the girl, as soon as they had turned northward, reverted to her
former attitude; and the man, knowing well that all this meant that
she was still determined upon a course necessarily delaying his
wooing and perhaps resulting in his discovery, frankly resumed his
opposition. He did more and worse: he swept aside all his method of
silence, all his plans of conquest through non-resistance.
"Now," he said, continuing their interrupted talk, "I should really
like to know what you, of all people in the world, were doing on
Rivington Street."
"I was there," she announced serenely, "because I have made up my
mind that it is I, of all people in the world, who ought to be there."
"Marian,"--he almost stopped as he said it--"are you really in
earnest about this fancy? Do you honestly mean that you are
seriously considering any such chimerical course?"
He had, naturally, chosen precisely the tone that, were any
additional incentive required, would have compelled her to
resolution. Her mind, as it chanced, was, however, made up, and what
he now said served only to turn her toward that feminine logic which
assumes as done that which is determined.
"I am past consideration," she said. "I have already virtually
begun."
"Marian! You're joking."
"I am simply stating a fact. Why do you suppose I have been staying
in town this summer? I begin my real work at the settlement with the
first of next week."
Her classmates in Rivington Street, could they have heard this, would
have been pleased, but they would also have been surprised.
Nevertheless, she at once mentally decided to make good her
declaration.
In the darkness Dyker bit the lip that, under his short, crisp
mustache, trembled with vexation.
"You really mean that?"
She bowed a brief assent.
"Then what, if you please, do you propose to do when you get there?"
As to that Marian found herself suddenly certain.
"You ought to know," she said, "how these people are living; you
ought to know how the girls--hundreds and hundreds of them--are every
week going into lives of shame and death. I mean to do what I can to
stop them."
It would have been a hard thing for her to say to him had he not
wrought upon her anger, and had not the freshness of her partial
glimpse of earth's lower seven-eighths fired her heart with a blind
inspiration. She had the partial vision that makes the martyr: a
vision that shows just enough of an evil to confirm the necessity of
action and not enough to prove how little individual action
individually directed can be worth.
For the second time Wesley gasped. Here were depths in her of which
he had not dreamed, and because he had not dreamed of them he would
not admit them.
"But you can't!" he protested. "It is impossible that you should.
It's inconceivable that a woman of your delicacy should go into such
coarse work!"
"Is it better that it should be left to coarse women? It seems to me
that there has been enough of coarseness in it already."
"But this--why, it's something that one can't even speak about!"
"Yes, something that we are not permitted even to mention, Wesley;
and because we aren't permitted even to mention it, the thing grows
and grows, night by night. It thrives in the shadow of our silence.
They tell me that the liquor laws are broken, because nobody will
mention it; that bestial men get rich in it, because nobody will
mention it; that in this city alone there are three hundred saloon
dance-halls intended to furnish its supply, because nobody will
mention it!"
Figuratively, Dyker threw up his hands in horror, but actually, like
all desperate men, he seized at the straws of detail.
"Now, that just shows how wrong your view of the whole subject
happens to be," he declared. "My work has put me in a position to
know something about these dance-halls, and I know that they exist
simply because the girls that go to them want them to exist--the
girls, mark you; not the men. Why, the girls aren't taken to such
places; they go of themselves, they pay their own admission, and it
is the usual thing for a girl earning six dollars a week in a store
to save fifty cents out of every salary-envelope for the dance-halls."
"Then you want me to conclude that the fact that they want to do the
thing makes the thing right?"
"You don't understand----"
"Precisely; and so I mean to learn."
"You can't learn. No matter how closely you study this whole matter,
you can't learn, Marian. How can a clean-hearted, clean-lived
American girl ever get the point of view of these low-down,
low-browed foreigners? It's the sort of thing they're used to."
"Before they begin it?"
"It's the survival of the fittest."
"Then can't some be made more fit to survive?"
"It's the law of life, and it can't be stopped."
"So was negro slavery the law of life. It couldn't be stopped
either--until we stopped it."
"That is all theory, Marian; it won't work out in practice. The
great point is that these unfortunate women, whether they become
unfortunate through the dance-halls or anywhere else, are simply not
our sort of clay: they're not Americans."
"They are human beings."
"A pretty low example."
"And they are more Americans than your ancestors or mine were three
hundred years ago."
"Nonsense. They're different, I tell you--different. Seriously, I
know what I am talking about: I speak from systematic investigations,
reports, statistics. The very latest investigation shows that all
but about thirteen per cent. of these women were either born abroad
or else are the children of foreign parents. It is always the newest
immigrants that swell the ranks, and of course the newest immigrants
are our lowest type."
"I don't see that all this alters the question."
"Well, it does."
"The lower they are, the more plainly it is our duty to raise them."
"My dear Marian, how can you raise them when you don't understand
them?"
Marian shook her handsome head.
"You _will_ come back to that," she said; "and all that I can answer
is that, not being utterly stupid, and having come to understand a
few abstract problems, I have hopes of mastering something so close
at hand to me and so concrete as a fellow human being."
"What, for instance?" asked Wesley, "can you understand of the
typical Jewish girl of the East Side?"
"A good deal, I think. They were talking about that type at the
settlement this evening. We were looking from the front windows at
an endless stream of Jewish girls tramping home from the factories
where they worked to the tenements where they slept. Somebody said
there are nearly four hundred thousand Jews living east of the
Bowery; that in most Jewish families the ambition to which every
comfort must be sacrificed is the education of the boys; that for
this reason the girls must work and are worked until there is nowhere
else in the world where so much labor is got out of young women, and
yet that the Jewess that is not married and a mother before she is
twenty is regarded as a family disgrace. It seems to me, Wesley,
that the case of those girls is pretty easy to understand. It seems
to me that they are on the horns of a rather ugly dilemma."
Dyker's cane whipped the air as if it were striking at the heads of
opposing arguments.
"You accept as gospel," he said, "everything that is told you by
anybody but me. It isn't a pleasant subject, but, if you insist upon
facts, let me tell you that there are troops of Jewesses who come
down here from the upper Ghetto and walk the streets for no other
purpose than to get money for their wedding trousseaus."
It was a blow at her conventions, and she shuddered; but she stood by
her guns. They had crossed down Twenty-sixth Street now and they
turned into the quiet of Madison Avenue, among comfortable houses and
silent churches, as she answered.
"If they do that," she said, "it is because they have to."
"Have to? Why on earth should they have to?"
"I don't know, but I know that the very use they make of the money
shows what they do is only a means and not an end."
"Are trousseaus so necessary that these girls have to sell their
souls for them?"
"Souls have been sold for less. Even you and I make considerable
sacrifices for things that other people in other classes would not
think needful at all."
He had done his best to bridle his annoyance, but now he could bridle
it no longer. He was wholly sincere in his inability to take
seriously either the girl or her point of view, and now, though he
felt as if he were riding a hunter at a butterfly, he charged blindly.
"Oh, please don't let us jump at sentiment and theory," he
remonstrated; "let us keep our feet on figures and fact. The figures
grow with the population; they always have so grown and they always
will so grow. And the plain fact is that, though a few good people
have been trying to stop this thing for four thousand years, they
have never succeeded in doing anything but soiling themselves in the
attempt."
"I know that," she frankly acknowledged, "and I don't know what it is
that's to blame; but I know that there isn't any evil that hasn't
some cure if we can only find it out."
"Then why not leave the search for a cure to the experienced?"
"I shall; but I propose to become one of the experienced. I mean to
give my time, at least for a while, to first-hand study. Perhaps
then I shall learn enough to know that it's useless for me to go on,
but I shall keep trying to go on until I am convinced that there
isn't any use in the trying."
"That's absurd, Marian--simply absurd. The condition is, after all,
one that must be dealt with by the law, and I tell you honestly that,
as yet, even the law is helpless."
"Has the law really tried? Has it ever attempted, for instance, to
do anything to the men that take these immigrant girls at the dock
and make slaves of them?"
"Yes, it has; it has tried just that. In Chicago two men were
arrested for taking a couple of such girls--they had brought them
from New York--and when the case was appealed, the United States
Supreme Court found that, though importation of girls was a violation
of federal law, yet the federal law providing a punishment for merely
_harboring_ such girls after their arrival was unconstitutional."
Marian's voice faltered.
"Is--is that true?" she asked.
"Absolutely," said Dyker. Like most lawyers of his generation, his
ideas of what was right were limited only by the final decisions of
what was legal, and if the Supreme Court of the United States had, by
even a majority of one, declared that the sun moved around the earth,
Dyker would have first denied and then forgotten all previous
astronomy.
"Absolutely," he repeated, and awaited her capitulation.
But Marian did not capitulate. She merely drew a long breath and
answered:
"After all, that, of course, is just a small portion of the big
question, and the only way it moves me is to lessen my opinion of the
Supreme Court."
It was Wesley's turn to gasp, and he did so. He had always suspected
that these college-settlements were hotbeds of Socialism and
Anarchy--two theories that, to Dyker, were one and the same--and now
he had his confirmation.
He was too cynically wrong upon one side of their subject to realize
how emotionally wrong she, in her hope of accomplishment through
personal appeal, might be upon the other. But here was a concrete
denial of his one sincere conviction, and, though he was at last calm
enough to see that he must not allow this conviction to wreck his
suit, he was not so calm as to maintain a clear judgment. It was
plain that Marian would not be turned from her experiment. His best
course was, he then reasoned, immediately to put on record his
opinion of its futility, even to quarrel with her in defense of that
opinion, and then, when experience brought the awakening upon which
his own worldly experience counted, to stand ready to profit by the
inevitable reaction that would most likely show the perfidy of the
women whom Marian hoped to help, detract from the credibility of any
gossip they might recount concerning him, and end by winning him his
wife.
"All right," he said sharply, "it is perfectly useless to talk
reasonably to anybody that can take such a view of so simple a
matter. Here is Thirty-fourth Street. I think we had better walk
over to Broadway and get that taxi."
The worst thing that a man can impute to a handsome woman is a lack
of intellect. Marian's cheeks flushed.
"I quite agree with you," she replied. "I am utterly incapable of
arguing with anybody that so confuses law and justice."
"Very well," said Dyker; "but I want you to remember what I have said
upon the subject as a whole. When you have trusted these women and
been betrayed by them, when they have poisoned your mind against all
the principles you have been brought up to believe, when you have
left the world of sentiment and bruised your poor hands with
hammering at the door of fact, then you will acknowledge that I have
been right. I am not angry----"
"Oh, of course not!"
"I am not angry, but I am firm. I only ask you to believe that I
shall never be far away from the settlement, and that you have only
to telephone for me when you have need of me."
Marian compressed her lips to a more severe firmness, and the ride
from Thirty-fourth Street to Riverside Drive was made in silence; but
the following Monday found her, against all parental protests,
enlisted as a settlement-worker in Rivington Street.