"But this?"
"Oh, this broke me up just because I had the bad luck to hear the details, though I must say I've heard the same details often enough before. Her people lived in a tenement in Essex Street, where it's so crowded that the men have to come outside every evening while their wives cook the dinners—three nine-by-seven rooms, no barth and no privacy; four children from eighteen to ten in one room; pa, ma, the boiby, and the seven-year-old in the second, and the cot in the kitchen-living-room rented to the lodger. The lodger was the wiggly snake under the apple-tree."
"He brought her here?"
"Gave her, as you might say, the general directions. But she'd have come along of her own self sometime."
"How could she?"
"How couldn't she, you mean! Those tenements are not for living in—there isn't room for that—they're just to eat in, when you've got enough, and sleep in, when you can sleep, and die in, when you have to."
"So this girl had to live outside?"
"On the doorsteps and the roofs when it was hot, and walking up and down the street when it wasn't."
Violet remembered her own home, and reflected that her excuse was less, because her surroundings had been better.
"That must have been pretty bad," she said.