I
couldn't get down to nothing 'til I ran around to see how she was and
how the baby was, and when I went up in her room--" The woman's
work-worn hands were pressed to her breast. "God--this world is a
hard place for girls who sin! It don't seem to matter about men, but
women--" Presently she raised her head and looked at us. "I never
seen a human being what had her spirit for enduring. She paid her
price without whining, but something must have happened what she
couldn't stand. She had a heart if she was--if she was--"

Two days later, as quietly as her life had ended, Etta's body, with
her baby on its breast, was put into the ground, and mingled with
David Guard's voice as he read the service for the dead was the
far-off murmur of city noises, the soft rise and fall of city sounds.
With Mrs. Mundy and Mrs. Banch, the old shoemaker and his wife, I
stood at the open grave and watched the earth piled into a mound that
marked a resting-place at last for a broken body and a soul no one
had tried to reach that it might save, but I did not hear the beating
of the clods of clay, nor the twittering of the birds in the trees,
nor the wind in their tops. I heard instead Etta's cry to Kitty and
to me: "In God's name, can't somebody do something to make good women
understand!"

It is these words that beat into my brain at night; these and the
words I did not speak in time and which, on the next day, were too
late. The note she sent Selwyn also keeps me awake.

"I am going," she wrote, "so the thought of me will not make you
afraid. You tried to help me, but there isn't any help for girls
like me. I am taking the baby with me. I want to be sure she will
be safe. It would be too hard for her, the fight she'd have to make.
I can't leave her here alone. ETTA."

Last night David Guard came in for a few minutes. Leaning back in a
big chair, he half closed his eyes and in silence watched the flames
of the fire, and, seeing he was far away in thought, I went on with
the writing of the letter I had put aside when he came in. I always
know when he is tired and worn, and I have learned to say nothing, to
be as silent as he when I see that the day's work has so wearied him
he does not wish to talk. At other times we talk much--talk of life
and its possibilities, of old cults and new philosophies, of books
and places; of the endless struggles of men like himself to be
intellectually honest