"Don't say that," protested the man. His eyes shone with zeal and his voice was tender. "His grace is free for all who come. His mercy is from everlastin' to everlastin'. I've been a sinner myself"—the speaker's voice swelled with a real pride—"a terrible sinner, an' I know what I say, praise the Lord. The meaner an' viler we are, the more Jesus needs us. Just open your heart. Just accept Him, an' you'll never know no more trouble in this world nor the next."
"Would I get a job?" asked Mary.
The man shook his head, sadly.
"That ain't no way to think about salvation," he declared. "What's freely given ought to be freely received. Now is the appointed time."
"But I gotta make a livin'."
"I know it, I know it. We've all got to do that, but ain't it better to make one an' be saved than to make one an' be sent to hell-fire?"
She assented. "Only," she added, "I don't want to starve, even if I am saved."
It was his old difficulty.
"I know," he repeated; "an' we'd only be too glad to get you work if we could, but times are hard an' we've got a waitin'-list of fifty at this very minute. Here's some meal-tickets, sister, fer we want to do what we can, an' we know it's hard to save souls on empty stomachs. You just think it over an' see if I'm not right about religion."
She took the tickets and used them at a five-cent eating-house during the next day. That night she managed to secure a bed in a room over a saloon—a narrow, stuffy room that she shared with three other women of her own sort; but the next night she earned nothing, and she had been compelled to pawn her coat for food. She sought a bench in Union Square, where two tattered men made room for her. They gave her, to wrap about her chest, newspapers that they had gathered from the gutter; and she dozed until the sharp command of a policeman scattered her comrades, when they made their way to the rear of the Flatiron Building and stood, for warmth, over a grill that sent up occasional blasts of heat from the basement.