"Wesley," she said, "I do remember all that you told me these women and this work would do to me. If you prove to be wrong, I shall stay on here, and, of course, never see you again; but if you prove to be right I shall give it up, and then, Wesley, I shall marry you." He rose with a glad cry; but she, rising also, waved him back. "Not yet," she said. "Either find Mary Morton and the proofs that she is dishonest--not only what I know she is, but dishonest in what she would say and do--show me this, or else----" With straining resolution, he confronted her. "Or else?" he prompted. "Or else bring her to me with her own denial and explanation." XXV DAUGHTERS OF ISHMAEL When Mary left Rivington Street she faced the inevitable. She had seen the impossibility of domestic service; she knew nothing of any other trade; she could not endure the shame of an institution, and her fortune consisted of just fourteen dollars and fifty cents. She walked, for a long time, aimlessly. The night thickened and, block by block, the streets flashed into electric illumination, each separate flame glowing like a malevolent eye to show her misery. Her strength, never yet fully restored, failed her. Her feet were tired, her knees bent irregularly, her head ached. As at her first sight of it, the city, which she knew scarcely better than on that spring evening when she had been tossed into it, was a conscious prison implacably shutting her in forever. She walked westward, and then northward. She dodged across Fifth Avenue among the automobiles of careless, comfortable people on their ways to one place or another of swift enjoyment. She passed a notorious café at the warm windows of which she saw, seated at laden tables and opposite leering men, the painted faces of softly gowned women, the more successful examples of what she soon must be. And she came to hurrying Broadway through whose crowds she saw silently and cunningly darting, with smiling hate written on their tired, rouged lips, the girls whose dawn was the lighting of the street-lamps and from whom she wanted to ask for instruction in the one means of livelihood that remained to her. Her soul was as weakened and vitiated as her body, and by much the same forces. Into her escape from Rose's, into her work at Mrs. Turner's, into her appeal to the employment-agency and her tasks at Mrs. Chamberlin's she had put every particle of strength that she could harness, and the result had always been failure. The social system was too mighty. She could not prevail against it. She must do its bidding, and since it was so impractically constituted as to bid her prey upon it, her sole solace must be found in preying fiercely.