rries away again.

The coloured cook turns to the elevator boy understandingly:

"Just like a woman! Why, before I'd _make a fuss_ about cauliflowers or
anything else!"

About eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat a plate of rice and
milk. While I am cutting bread for the two hundred I hear her say to the
cook in a gossipy tone:

"How do you like the new girl? She's here all alone."

I am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation. When I
return the cook lectures me in this way:

"Here alone, are you?"

"Yes."

"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get along nicely and not kill
yourself with work either. Just stick at it and they'll do right by you.
Lots o' girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. Now I like
everybody to have a good time, and I hope you'll have a good time, too,
but you mustn't carry it too far."

My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night
before with a working-girl at my boarding-house.

"Where is your home?" I asked.

She had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to
take a rest.

She looked at me skeptically.

"We don't have no homes," was her answer. "We just get up and get
whenever they send us along."

And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two sad cases that had come
close to my notice as fellow boarders.

I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour. The
matron had gone out and left me to "answer the door." The bell rang and
I opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and
sleet about on the winter air. A young girl came in; she was seeking a
lodging. Her skirts and shoes were heavy with water. She took off her
things slowly in a dazed manner. Her short, quick breathing showed how
excited she was. When she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her
eyes moved about restlessly. She stopped abruptly now and then and
contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she
continued in the same broken, husky voice:

"I suppose I'm not the only one in trouble. I've thought a thousand
times over that I would kill myself. I suppose I loved him--but I _hate_
him now."

These two sentences, recurring, were the story's all.

The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the
instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being
left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was
pleasure