During all the months that followed she skirted the dire edge of starvation, more than half the time too ill to rise from her bed and aware that she was at no moment fit to rise. As her cold grew steadily better her deeper illness steadily increased. It thrived on every exertion and seemed to gain each atom of strength that she lost. Things might thus continue for almost any period, but she knew that her manner of life forbade absolute cure, and that, at the end, there waited a slow and loathsome death. Anticipation made her faint; the melancholia and terror, which are symptomatic, sometimes nearly maddened her. The last vestiges of the moral sense, so early injured by previous experience, were almost wholly destroyed; there was no social consciousness; the appeal of the individual widened until it occupied her entire horizon; there was room for nothing but the craven passion for life. Fat Dr. Helwig, when she went to see him, blinked at her out of his deep-set eyes, and told her that she was not taking sufficient rest. Mary twisted her helpless hands. "How can I afford to take it?" she asked. "Save your money," said he, patting her thin shoulders, and chuckling prosperously. "You girls never put aside a cent." "We don't earn enough." "Poof! That's what you all say. I know--I know. We men aren't such fools as you take us for." But Mary, as each evening she made up before her little mirror, noted the gradual depreciation of her wares; each week she found it harder to pay rent and retain enough money for food. Mrs. Foote seemed to come every day, instead of every seventh, and yet each night business grew more difficult. Whenever Mary missed a few evenings, or whenever she changed her hunting-grounds, the police needed fresh payments. She surrendered one uptown cross-street after another. At last she deserted Broadway and patrolled only that Fourteenth Street which the woman at the Haymarket had so scornfully referred to and which had so wonderfully burst upon Mary's sight when she first stepped from the Hudson Tunnel upon the surface of Manhattan. Spring, summer, and autumn passed, and a lean winter followed them. Mary caught another cold and was ill for a week. She went to work too soon and had to go back to bed for several days and remain idle for several nights. At last, with the ancient fear of the white race--the fear of that poverty which is death--gnawing at her vitals, she struggled to her feet and tramped once more along Fourteenth Street from Sixth Avenue to Third. But now the sword descended. Even the Fourteenth Street saloon best known for her purposes gave no fish to her net, and Eighth Street was little better. She was too tired to go farther; she had, the next morning, to offer Mrs. Foote only a third of what was due.