imself, a
sudden remembrance of places where he had been tainted, made unfit to
touch her,--rows in Bowery dance-houses, waltzes with musk-scented fine
ladies: when this girl put her cool little hand in his sometimes, he
felt tears coming to his eyes, as if the far-off God or the dead mother
had blessed him. She sat there, now, going back to that blot in her
life, her eyes turned every moment up to the Power beyond in whom she
trusted, to know why it had been. He had seen little children, struck
by their mother's hand, turn on them a look just so grieved and so
appealing.

"It was no one's fault altogether, Paul," she said. "My mother was not
selfish, more than other women. There were very many mouths to feed: it
is so in most families like ours."

"I know."

"I am very dull about books,--stupid, they say. I could not teach; and
they would not let me sew for money, because of the disgrace. These are
the only ways a woman has. If I had been a boy"--

"I understand."

"No man can understand,"--her voice growing shrill with pain. "It's not
easy to eat the bread needed for other mouths day after day, with your
hands tied, idle and helpless. A boy can go out and work, in a hundred
ways: a girl must marry; it's her only chance for a livelihood, or a
home, or anything to fill her heart with. Don't blame my mother, Paul.
She had ten of us to work for. From the time I could comprehend, I knew
her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and
her daughters in homes of their own. It was the old story, Doctor
Blecker,"--with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry. "I've noticed
it since in a thousand other houses. Young girls like me in these
poor-genteel families,--there are none of God's creatures more helpless
or goaded, starving at their souls. I couldn't teach. I had no talent;
but if I had, a woman's a woman: she wants something else in her life
than dog-eared school-books and her wages year after year."

Blecker could hardly repress a smile.

"You are coming to political economy by a woman's road, Grey."

"I don't know what that is. I know what my life was then. I was only a
child; but when that man came and held out his hand to take me, I was
willing when they gave me to him,--when they sold me, Doctor Blecker. It
was like leaving some choking pit, where air was given to me from other
lungs, to go out and find it for my own. What marriage was or ought to
be I did not know; but I wanted, as ev