“Do you remember your name? Will you tell it to me, so I can call you by it?” said Cis.
“Lots of names, lots of names; plenty names. Here I’m Pearl Molineaux. Out in ’Frisco I was Carmin Casanova. Giddy Gay—that was somewhere else; I forget. Home in Chicago I was Myrtle Moore; that’s while I was married,” the woman said, speaking slowly.
“Chicago!” “Myrtle Moore?” Cicely’s heart gave a great leap, then stood still. Could it be? She was sure that it was! She was sure that it had been given her to save from suicide Rodney’s wife.
She bent down over the woman who had sagged low in the seat of the taxicab.
“You are the wife of George Rodney Moore?” she asked.
“No. Divorced. Rod and I were divorced,” she said.
“Oh, God help me!” Cis murmured, and Tom was frightened by the pallor of her face.
“Oh, God, I’ll try! Please, help me! Help her; help me to help her!”
The cab stopped at the door of that beneficent house wherein stainless women welcome within their consecrated walls the outcasts whose stains of soul their pure hands labor to remove; wherein the virgin servants of the Good Shepherd carry back to Him His lost black sheep.
Myrtle Moore was reluctant to enter that portal, but her strength was spent, her will too enfeebled by illness to resist anyone who decided for her and forcibly executed their decisions.