you are a bad woman, we don' trust
you--you speak lie.' But I speak druth, I am nod a bad woman--I gome
from Hamburg." "Yes, yes," I murmured; "yes, yes." "I do not know this
country well, sir. I speak bad English. Is that why they do not drust
my word?" She was silent for a moment, searching my face, then broke out
again: "It is all 'ard work in my profession, I make very liddle, I
cannot afford to be rob. Without the men I cannod make my living, I must
drust them--and they rob me like this, it is too 'ard." And the slow
tears rolled faster and faster from her eyes on to her hands and her
black lap. Then quietly, and looking for a moment singularly like a big,
unhappy child, she asked: "Will you blease dell me, sir, why they will
not give me the law of that dirty little man?"

I knew--and too well; but I could not tell her.

"You see," I said, "it's just a case of your word against his." "Oh! no;
but," she said eagerly, "he give me the note--I would not have taken it
if I 'ad not thought it good, would I? That is sure, isn't it? But five
pounds it is not my price. It must that I give 'im change! Those
gentlemen that heard my case, they are men of business, they must know
that it is not my price. If I could tell the judge--I think he is a man
of business too he would know that too, for sure. I am not so young. I
am not so veree beautiful as all that; he must see, mustn't he, sir?"

At my wits' end how to answer that most strange question, I stammered
out: "But, you know, your profession is outside the law."

At that a slow anger dyed her face. She looked down; then, suddenly
lifting one of her dirty, ungloved hands, she laid it on her breast with
the gesture of one baring to me the truth in her heart. "I am not a bad
woman," she said: "Dat beastly little man, he do the same as me--I am
free-woman, I am not a slave bound to do the same to-morrow night, no
more than he. Such like him make me what I am; he have all the pleasure,
I have all the work. He give me noding--he rob my poor money, and he
make me seem to strangers a bad woman. Oh, dear! I am not happy!"

The impulse I had been having to press on her the money, died within me;
I felt suddenly it would be another insult. From the movement of her
fingers about her heart I could not but see that this grief of hers was
not about the money. It was the inarticulate outburst of a bitter sense
of deep injustice; of all the dumb wondering at her o