"What, for instance?" asked Wesley, "can you understand of the typical Jewish girl of the East Side?"
"A good deal, I think. They were talking about that type at the settlement this evening. We were looking from the front windows at an endless stream of Jewish girls tramping home from the factories where they worked to the tenements where they slept. Somebody said there are nearly four hundred thousand Jews living east of the Bowery; that in most Jewish families the ambition to which every comfort must be sacrificed is the education of the boys; that for this reason the girls must work and are worked until there is nowhere else in the world where so much labor is got out of young women, and yet that the Jewess that is not married and a mother before she is twenty is regarded as a family disgrace. It seems to me, Wesley, that the case of those girls is pretty easy to understand. It seems to me that they are on the horns of a rather ugly dilemma."
Dyker's cane whipped the air as if it were striking at the heads of opposing arguments.
"You accept as gospel," he said, "everything that is told you by anybody but me. It isn't a pleasant subject, but, if you insist upon facts, let me tell you that there are troops of Jewesses who come down here from the upper Ghetto and walk the streets for no other purpose than to get money for their wedding trousseaus."
It was a blow at her conventions, and she shuddered; but she stood by her guns. They had crossed down Twenty-sixth Street now and they turned into the quiet of Madison Avenue, among comfortable houses and silent churches, as she answered.
"If they do that," she said, "it is because they have to."
"Have to? Why on earth should they have to?"
"I don't know, but I know that the very use they make of the money shows what they do is only a means and not an end."
"Are trousseaus so necessary that these girls have to sell their souls for them?"
"Souls have been sold for less. Even you and I make considerable sacrifices for things that other people in other classes would not think needful at all."