She could not do it. With nothing but suffering and horrors to live for, she could not put an end to life. She was afraid of the cold; she was afraid of the struggle; she was afraid of the pang; she was afraid of Death. It was a new thing--Death; she had been afraid of it ever since that morning of her awakening when the thought of seeking it had first occurred to her. Since her first crossing of this water, her experiences had been a procession of new things, each more terrible than the last; she had come to dread the new, and this novelty of death she dreaded lest it should be the most terrible of all. Life, which had robbed her of everything else, had, at this last, robbed her of the courage to quit it. Youth, hope, purity, strength, beauty, the ability to work, even lust and hate--all these were dead within her, dead beyond possibility of resurrection. If Max had only given her a child! If he, or anyone of the others, had only killed her! But they had murdered Love, and the only thing that lived in her was the fear of death. Out of the bitterness of her own heart, out of the abysses of her own knowledge of things as they are, she saw much of the truth. A rare good fortune had favored Katie Flanagan; but Mary, her parents, Rose and her girls, Carrie, Policeman Riley and Magistrate Dyker, even Angel and Max--not one of them, well regarded, could be unequivocally condemned. They were all, preying or preyed upon, an inevitable result. They were but the types of millions everywhere. New York itself, with all its women-slaves and men-slaves, must be but an illustration of what the other cities of the world are and have been. No rescue of a slave could put an end to the slavery. Something was wrong; but what that something was, or how it was ever to be made right, she could not guess. She knew only that, down the years, wherever walked the great god Poverty, that great god led Prostitution by the hand. Finally comprehending, if unable to formulate, these things, at ten o'clock that night Mary Denbigh, remembering what Philip Beekman had told her, rang the doorbell of a familiar house and faced what she would once have feared more than death--she faced complacent, untroubled, prosperous, and protected Rose Légère. The woman, still the good-natured woman of the brewery-calendar, cut short Mary's flow of apologies. "Ferget it," she said. "It don't matter what you did. You didn't know any better. Here: just take this ten dollars and tell me what else I can do for you." And Mary pushed the money away. "I don't want that," she said. "I want--oh, Miss Rose, won't you please take me back?" But Rose, surveying the human ruin before her, shook, very positively, her masses of yellow hair. "No," she answered, "I'm sorry, but I can't do that. It wouldn't be good business. You see, the life's got you, Violet: you're all in." _EDITOR'S NOTE_