t, which was crowded with
the prisoners and those who had come out of curiosity or in the hope
of recognizing one of the men and getting a case for blackmail. The men
were called up first, and reprimanded in a bunch, and then dismissed;
but, Jurgis, to his terror, was called separately, as being a
suspicious-looking case. It was in this very same court that he had been
tried, that time when his sentence had been "suspended"; it was the same
judge, and the same clerk. The latter now stared at Jurgis, as if he
half thought that he knew him; but the judge had no suspicions--just
then his thoughts were upon a telephone message he was expecting from a
friend of the police captain of the district, telling what disposition
he should make of the case of "Polly" Simpson, as the "madame" of the
house was known. Meantime, he listened to the story of how Jurgis had
been looking for his sister, and advised him dryly to keep his sister
in a better place; then he let him go, and proceeded to fine each of the
girls five dollars, which fines were paid in a bunch from a wad of bills
which Madame Polly extracted from her stocking.

Jurgis waited outside and walked home with Marija. The police had left
the house, and already there were a few visitors; by evening the place
would be running again, exactly as if nothing had happened. Meantime,
Marija took Jurgis upstairs to her room, and they sat and talked. By
daylight, Jurgis was able to observe that the color on her cheeks was
not the old natural one of abounding health; her complexion was in
reality a parchment yellow, and there were black rings under her eyes.

"Have you been sick?" he asked.

"Sick?" she said. "Hell!" (Marija had learned to scatter her
conversation with as many oaths as a longshoreman or a mule driver.)
"How can I ever be anything but sick, at this life?"

She fell silent for a moment, staring ahead of her gloomily. "It's
morphine," she said, at last. "I seem to take more of it every day."

"What's that for?" he asked.

"It's the way of it; I don't know why. If it isn't that, it's drink. If
the girls didn't booze they couldn't stand it any time at all. And the
madame always gives them dope when they first come, and they learn to
like it; or else they take it for headaches and such things, and get
the habit that way. I've got it, I know; I've tried to quit, but I never
will while I'm here."

"How long are you going to stay?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said.