As to that Marian found herself suddenly certain. "You ought to know," she said, "how these people are living; you ought to know how the girls--hundreds and hundreds of them--are every week going into lives of shame and death. I mean to do what I can to stop them." It would have been a hard thing for her to say to him had he not wrought upon her anger, and had not the freshness of her partial glimpse of earth's lower seven-eighths fired her heart with a blind inspiration. She had the partial vision that makes the martyr: a vision that shows just enough of an evil to confirm the necessity of action and not enough to prove how little individual action individually directed can be worth. For the second time Wesley gasped. Here were depths in her of which he had not dreamed, and because he had not dreamed of them he would not admit them. "But you can't!" he protested. "It is impossible that you should. It's inconceivable that a woman of your delicacy should go into such coarse work!" "Is it better that it should be left to coarse women? It seems to me that there has been enough of coarseness in it already." "But this--why, it's something that one can't even speak about!" "Yes, something that we are not permitted even to mention, Wesley; and because we aren't permitted even to mention it, the thing grows and grows, night by night. It thrives in the shadow of our silence. They tell me that the liquor laws are broken, because nobody will mention it; that bestial men get rich in it, because nobody will mention it; that in this city alone there are three hundred saloon dance-halls intended to furnish its supply, because nobody will mention it!" Figuratively, Dyker threw up his hands in horror, but actually, like all desperate men, he seized at the straws of detail. "Now, that just shows how wrong your view of the whole subject happens to be," he declared. "My work has put me in a position to know something about these dance-halls, and I know that they exist simply because the girls that go to them want them to exist--the girls, mark you; not the men. Why, the girls aren't taken to such places; they go of themselves, they pay their own admission, and it is the usual thing for a girl earning six dollars a week in a store to save fifty cents out of every salary-envelope for the dance-halls." "Then you want me to conclude that the fact that they want to do the thing makes the thing right?" "You don't understand----" "Precisely; and so I mean to learn." "You can't learn. No matter how closely you study this whole matter, you can't learn, Marian. How can a clean-hearted, clean-lived American girl ever get the point of view of these low-down, low-browed foreigners? It's the sort of thing they're used to." "Before they begin it?" "It's the survival of the fittest." "Then can't some be made more fit to survive?" "It's the law of life, and it can't be stopped."