In the midnight hour my friend of Heartsease hears of a young girl, evidently a new-comer, whom the brothel or the saloon has in its clutch, and she gets out of bed, and, going after her, demands her sister, and gets her out from the very jaws of hell. Again, on a winter’s night, a drunken woman finds her way to her door—a married woman with a husband and children. And she gets out of her warm bed again, and, when the other is herself, takes her home, never leaving her till she is safe.
I found her papering the walls and painting the floor in her room. I said to her that I did not think you could do anything with those women,—and neither can you, if they are just “those women” to you. Jesus could. One came and sat at his feet and wept, and dried them with her hair.
“Oh,” said she, “it isn’t so! They come, and are glad to stay. I don’t know that they are finally saved, that they never fall again. But here, anyhow, we have given them a resting spell and time to think. And plenty turn good.”
She told me of a girl brought in by her brother as incorrigible. No one knew what to do with her. She stayed in that atmosphere of affection three months, and went forth to service. That was nearly half a year before, and she had “stayed good.” A chorus girl lived twelve years with a man, who then cast her off. Heartsease sent her out a domestic, at ten dollars a month, and she, too, “stayed good.”
“I don’t consider,” said the woman of Heartsease, simply, “that we are doing it right, but we will yet.”
I looked at her, the frail girl with this unshaken, unshakable faith in the right, and asked her, not where she got her faith—I knew that—but where she got the money to run the house. Alas, for poor human nature that will not accept the promise that “all these things shall be added unto you!” She laughed.
“The rent is pledged by half a dozen friends. The rest—comes.”
“But how?”
She pointed to a lot of circulars, painfully written out in the night watches.
“We are selling soap just now,” she said; “but it is not always soap. Here,” patting a chair, “this is Larkin’s soap; that chafing-dish is green stamps; this set of dishes is Mother’s Oats. We write to the people, you see, and they buy the things, and we get the prizes. We’ve furnished the house in that way. And some give us money. A man offered to give an entertainment, promising to give us $450 of the receipts. And then the Charity Organization Society warned us against him, and we had to give up the $450,” with a sigh. But she brightened up in a moment: “The very next day we got $1000 for our building fund. We shall have to move some day.”