“You have just two things that will help me,” said McGregor; “your beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.
“There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy in the passageway and why it was done,” McGregor went on. “You're a fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the parlour of their houses.
“Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.
“I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here. They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of these people. None of them—the bosses or the police—are watching you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You can do the job if you're any good.”
After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him. For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no way diverted by her beauty nor her self-possession. A hot wave, half anger, half admiration, swept over her.
McGregor stared at the woman and waited. “I've got to have facts,” he said. “Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and I'll make them tell. I have some facts now—got them by bullying a girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women talk and tell you and then you tell me.”
When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about her in the First Ward. Her self-possession was shaken. “If they are children—these women of the town—then I am a child, a child swimming with them in a sea of hate and ugliness.”
A new thought came into her mind. “But he is no child—that McGregor. He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken.”
She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the man's speech. “He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of the streets,” she thought. “He was not afraid to assume that at bottom we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares.”
In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to pounce upon her. “Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I will have to do that,” she whispered to herself.