But her father shook his head.
“No, ’twan’t that. She had good pay, a dollar and seventy-five cents a week at Hempin and Morton’s. She sent considerable money home.”
I groaned. Less than two dollars a week; a dollar to pay for a room; poverty crying out in the old home; slow starvation, and the inevitable end.
“She could not live on that in the city!” I cried. “She could not keep body and soul together. Hempin and Morton’s is a great cheap, gaudy shop. Hempin and Morton’s women clerks are kept on starvation wages, and are told, yes, are told by members of the firm, when they rebel, that pretty girls are not expected to live upon their pay.”
I was quoting the Anarchist.
“You must forgive her,” I went on. “I am sure she suffered more than we can tell. I am sure she fought bravely before she gave up.”
“I ain’t never blamed her much,” he whispered, his cold blue eyes gleaming with tears. “Her mother was for lettin’ her go. But every year since it happened I’ve come up to the city for a spell to look for her. I heard of your place here, and su’mised you might know something about her.”
I took the old man to my home. He was too feeble to come with me in my search. Then I went to the only woman in the city who could find Polly for me.
That was Miss Hobbs, the little missionary. She lives in a wretched court, in the wickedest part of the city, down where the great Jewish thoroughfare of the East End runs across the Italian and the Portuguese quarters, on its way to Traffic Street.
She is alone except for one girl whom she has taken from the streets. Together they do what the city charities call ‘rescue work.’ Night after night they search through the dives and dens and opium-joints of the city for the women who are stranded there. For every one saved from that life, twenty drift back to it. Yet the rescue work never stops.