There, under a leafy tree, whose flat branches shielded her somewhat from
the rain, slept the outcast. She had dozed off into slumber, sitting
there alone. She was not lying, only sitting there, her arm flung over
the back of the seat, her head fallen on her shoulder, her face upturned
to the pitying night. It was the face of a street-walker, bloated and
purplish, the poor pretence of colour gone, the haggard lines showing,
all the awful life of her stamped upon it; yet in the lamplight, upturned
in its helplessness, sealed with the sleep that had come at last to her,
sore-footed, as softly as it might have come to a little baby falling
asleep amid its play, there enhaloed it the incarnation of triumphant
suffering. On the swollen cheeks of the homeless woman the night had shed
its tears of rain. There amid the wind and wet, in the darkness, alone
and weary, shame-worn and sin-sodden, scorned by the Pharisee, despised
by the vicious, the harlot slept and forgot. Calm as death itself was the
face of her. Softly and gently she breathed, as does the heavy-eyed bride
whose head the groom's arm pillows. Nature, our Mother Nature, had taken
her child for a moment to her breast and the outcast rested there awhile,
all sorrows forgotten, all desires stilled, all wrongs and sins and shame
obscured and blotted out. She envied none. Equal was she with all. Great
indeed is Sleep, which teaches us day by day that none is greater in
God's sight than another, that as we all came equal and naked from the
unknown so naked and equal we shall all pass on to the Unknown again,
that this life is but as a phantasy in which it is well to so play one's
part that nightly one falls asleep without fear and meets at last the
great sleep without regret!

But, oh, the suffering that had earned for this forsaken sister the sweet
sleep she slept! Oh, the ceaseless offering of this sin-stained body, the
contumelious jeers she met, the vain search through streets and avenues
this wild night, for the blind lust that would give her shelter and food!
Oh, the efforts to beg, the saints who would not wait to listen to such a
one, the sinners who were as penniless! Oh, the shivering fits that walk,
walk, walk, when the midnight hours brought silence and solitude, the
stamps that racked her poor limbs when she laid down, exhausted, in
dripping garments, on the hard park seats, the aching feet that refused
at last the ceaseless tramping in their soaked and broken