“How do you know that?” demanded Grove Evans, almost rudely. He felt his club appointment slipping away from him and the poker game owed him two hundred dollars.
Mary looked from her aunt to her uncle.
“I know,” she replied, “because I have been there. I know because I myself bought four girls there!”
The company gasped its surprise.
“I told them I was ‘in the business’ in Seattle,” the speaker continued. “I told them I wanted to buy. I asked for four girls—four young girls. They sold me four for one hundred dollars each.”
There was a silence for a long moment. It was broken by Marvin Lattimer.
“Impossible!” he exclaimed.
Mary looked at him sadly. “There is one fact more impossible than that, Mr. Lattimer,” she said. “It is that men of the world like you—men who, above all others, should make it their business to know these things,—cry out ‘Impossible!’ when such a fact is exhibited before you in all its hideousness.”
“You should have had the man who sold those girls arrested,” blurted Grove Evans.
“I did,” replied Mary quietly, “and The Reporter, in which you are a part owner, suppressed publication of the fact. I had the man arrested and Jim Edwards, the politician who holds the district in the hollow of his hand, prevented the case from going to trial. That man walks the streets of Chicago free and without bond.”