Tucker's--after she had spent
several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking
about the miseries of the fast women of the only class she
could hope to enter. "A woman," she decided, "can't even earn
a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the
right sort of a start. `To him that hath shall be given; from
him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he
hath.' Gideon was my chance and I threw it away."
Still, she did not regret. Of all the horrors the most
repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who
could take it away at his whim.
She disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the
rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls.
She believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls
with more false pride, with more awe of snobbish
conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the
superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints
and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying
and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug
morality. She felt that she could bear with almost any
annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to
get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see
it and the nose smell it. But she found all the homes full,
with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the
working girls said, with professional objects of charity.
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