CHAPTER X.
MARION’S FIRST WEEK AT CHARITY.
In less than a week Marion began to feel quite at home in the big hospital, whose windows overlooked a scene of magnificence as well as much that was less inspiring.
Strips of clear blue water stretched on both sides of the island, and as Marion listened to the thrilling tales and traditions which have long made Hell Gate a place of blood-curdling interest, she could hardly turn her eyes from the far-famed danger spot. It seemed to enthral her in some spell of enchantment.
The great cities of Brooklyn and New York made a magnificent background to the scene. Spires towered from expensive churches, and at sunset the plate-glass windows of the many noble structures gave back a glow which was almost glorious.
Thus the city’s grandeur and luxury was before her eyes, while its misery was in even closer proximity, for was she not caring for its victims, its slaves and its outcasts in the very wards of this isolated building?
“Oh, to think that such wretchedness should exist!” she sighed over and over. “To think that with all the wealth and luxury of New York, these poor, poor creatures should drag out such an existence!”
As Marion passed through the wards, her heart was heavy within her. It was a condition which the simple country girl had never dreamed could exist—a condition which she could by any possibility have imagined, but, nevertheless, one of the saddest, sternest, most reliable facts in the history of the city.
Inside were the sick, the deformed, the crippled. Women whom shame had driven from the sight of the world, others whom care, abuse, over-work and under-pay had reduced to that condition known as invalid vagrancy.
Outside, in the numerous buildings, were other classes—criminals, “crooks,” “scapegraces” and prodigals and careworn men and decrepit women—paupers, homeless and penniless at the close of life and dependent upon what some have called a city’s “charity.”