He had
merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary
with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept
forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.
I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had "gone
astray"--the poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and sixteen
years old, with their moral natures apparently untouched and
unawakened; one of them whom the police had found in a
professional house and asked us to shelter for a few days until
she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll
which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil
life." Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day
directly from the maternity ward of the Cook County hospital,
each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they
did not want to go home for fear of "being licked." For them were
no jewels nor idle living such as the storybooks portrayed. The
first of the older women whom I knew came to Hull-House to ask
that her young sister, who was about to arrive from Germany,
might live near us; she wished to find her respectable work and
wanted her to have the "decent pleasures" that Hull-House
afforded. After the arrangement had been completed and I had in
a measure recovered from my astonishment at the businesslike way
in which she spoke of her own life, I ventured to ask her
history.
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