"I know," he repeated; "an' we'd only be too glad to get you work if we could, but times are hard an' we've got a waitin'-list of fifty at this very minute. Here's some meal-tickets, sister, fer we want to do what we can, an' we know it's hard to save souls on empty stomachs. You just think it over an' see if I'm not right about religion." She took the tickets and used them at a five-cent eating-house during the next day. That night she managed to secure a bed in a room over a saloon--a narrow, stuffy room that she shared with three other women of her own sort; but the next night she earned nothing, and she had been compelled to pawn her coat for food. She sought a bench in Union Square, where two tattered men made room for her. They gave her, to wrap about her chest, newspapers that they had gathered from the gutter; and she dozed until the sharp command of a policeman scattered her comrades, when they made their way to the rear of the Flatiron Building and stood, for warmth, over a grill that sent up occasional blasts of heat from the basement. The rapidity with which one may descend from bad to worse is to be believed only by those who have been penniless and friendless in the larger cities. During the nights that followed, when Mary's clothes grew speedily ragged, dirty, and odorous, and when she earned just enough money to postpone starvation, she became a familiar of Chinatown, learned something of its blind paths and the tangled passages of its fetid tenements. The almond-eyed Orientals tolerantly received her. She came to know the heavy odors of the opium, to chat with clay-white American girls, morphine-eaters, and cocaine and chloral victims, whose Chinese lovers were kind to them, and who never wanted to breathe the open air. She was borne with, but the market was over-supplied there, and she found no regular keeper. She came to envy the drug-enslaved women who had first sought the Mott Street district as missionaries, even the little Mongolian girls over whose slavery, so much lighter than her own, the city, from time to time, grew ludicrously excited. Her illness progressed, but, thanks to her hardy birth and the exercise of what care was at all possible, it progressed with a step so tardy as to give no indication of reaching its tragic end, other things being equal, for two years or more. She did not again go to see the doctor; she did not have to. The only things that he could have advised were the things that she was in no position to do. Beyond a certain limited amount of routine care, she was helpless. One night, wet and exhausted, she met a sailor in Chatham Square, and drank long with him. "Where you goin' to sleep to-night?" he asked, as they were about to part.