ything she had ever tried,
if only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to
sit idle through the long summer months--well, I should say not!--with
eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent
father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of
shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy
years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest
with lifelike reality.

Scarcely less interesting than all this to me was my own story to
Bessie, which found ready sympathy in her tender heart, especially that
part of it that had to do with the home for working girls where I was
now living. For to Bessie, with her inborn racial love of family,
nothing was so much to be pitied as the unfortunates who found shelter
there. She seemed to take a certain sort of consolation for her own hard
life in hearing the sordid details of the wretched waifs and strays that
came wandering into the "home" at all hours of the day and night. I told
her about the dormitory where we slept side by side in gray-blanketed
cots, each girl's clothes folded neatly across the footboard; of the
cross old dragon who sat outside in the brightly lighted passageway, and
snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her
duties,--which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one another
of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not
scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded
in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. For such offenses, and they
happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of
the sour, autocratic matron. As each night brought a fresh relay of
girls to the dormitory, it was productive of a new series of episodes,
which I related faithfully to Bessie.

That is how she became interested in Eunice. The latter had come
tiptoeing into the dormitory one night long after the other girls were
fast asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next
to mine. In the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her
face, I saw, as I peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was
no common type of waif and stray. There was an elusive charm in the
glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain
suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that
enveloped them like a death-mask. As I was gazing furtive