that it might fight through
its early years of struggle and expand into a human being who counted as
_one_ at least among the world's millions. Usually the mother died in the
gutter or the hospital, but there had been women who survived, and when
they did so it was often because they made a battle for their children.
Sometimes it was because they were made of the material which is not
easily beaten, and then they learned as the years went by that the human
soul and will may be even stronger than that which may seem at the outset
overwhelming fate.

When the girl Susan Chapman fell into misfortune and disgrace, her path
was not made easy for her. There were a few months when the young mill
hand who brought disaster upon her, made love to her, and hung about her
small home, sometimes leaning upon the rickety gate to talk and laugh
with her, sometimes loitering with her in the streets or taking her to
cheap picnics or on rather rowdy excursions. She wore the excited and
highly pleased air seen in young women of her class when the masculine
creature is paying court. She spent her wages in personal decoration, she
bought cheap feathers and artificial flowers and remnants on "bargain
days," and decked herself with them. Her cheap, good looks reached their
highest point because she felt the glow of a promotive triumph and her
spirits were exhilarated. She was nearer happiness than she had ever been
before. The other girls, who were mill hands like herself, were full of
the usual rather envious jokes about her possible marriage. To be married
was to achieve a desirable distinction and to work at home instead of at
the Mills. The young man was not an absolute villain, he was merely an
ignorant, foolish young animal. At first he had had inchoate beliefs in a
domestic future with the girl. But the time came when equally inchoate
ideas of his own manhood led him to grow cool. The New England atmosphere
which had not influenced him in all points, influenced him in the matter
of feeling that the woman a man married must have kept herself
respectable. The fact that he himself had caused her fall from the plane
of decency was of comparatively small moment.

A man who married a woman who had not managed to keep straight, put
himself into a sort of ridiculous position. He lost masculine
distinction. This one ceased to lean on the gate and talk at night, and
went to fewer picnics. He was in less high spirits, and so was the girl.
She of