orders who
worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, cooks,
maids. But, as she now realized, it is one thing to pass upon the work
of others; it is another thing to do work oneself. She-- There was
literally nothing that she could do. Any occupation, even the most
menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond
both.

Suddenly she recalled that she could sing. Her prostrate spirit
suddenly leaped erect. Yes, she could sing! Her voice had been praised
by experts. Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments
where amateurs had to compete with professionals. Then down she
dropped again. She sang well enough to know how badly she sang--the
long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and
operatic or concert or even music-hall stage. Her voice was fine at
times. Again--most of the time--it was unreliable. No, she could not
hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer. Miss
Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a
Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.

"There is nothing I can do--nothing!"

All at once, with no apparent bridge across the vast chasm, her heart
went out, not in pity but in human understanding and sisterly sympathy,
to the women of the pariah class at whom, during her stops in New York,
she had sometimes gazed in wonder and horror. "Why, we and they are
only a step apart," she said to herself in amazement. "We and they are
much nearer than my maid or the cook and they!"

And then her heart skipped a beat and her skin grew cold and a fog
swirled over her brain. If she should be cast out--if she could find
no work and no one to support her--would she-- "O my God!" she moaned.
"I must be crazy, to think such thoughts. I never could! I'd die
first--DIE!" But if anyone had pictured to her the kind of life she
was now leading--the humiliation and degradation she was meekly
enduring with no thought of flight, with an ever stronger desire to
stay on, regardless of pride and self-respect--if anyone had pictured
this to her as what she would endure, what would she have said? She
could see herself flashing scornful denial, saying that she would
rather kill herself. Yet she was living--and was not even
contemplating suicide as a way out!

A few days after Presbury gave her warning, her mother took advantage
of his absence for his religiously observed daily con