With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some likeness to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied, and such intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that point of view to differ from which could bring nothing save serious discomfort. To the hope of Max's return she still, in her own heart, clung with that tenacity which only a woman can exert upon an acknowledged impossibility, but she felt even this hope shrink between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to reason, she knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought her and left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic destiny. Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a child, and, like most children, the individual at fault in every personal catastrophe. It was thus that she began by blaming herself for all that had now befallen her; it was only at moments of growth that she turned her anger first against her own parents, then against the active agent and finally against his principal, and it would be but after deeper vision and harder usage that she could see both herself and them, and the whole company that made them possible, as mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine. And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release. Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no escape; but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to the one source from which she could conceive of their coming. VI AN ANGEL UNAWARES The man to whom she first spoke, in a stolen instant, descending the darkened stair, was a small shopkeeper, fat and pliable, beyond the age of violence, and, as he had just told her, a husband and the father of a girl of her own age. "Listen," she said, with one trembling hand upon his shoulder, "I want you to do me a favor." "Anything you say, Violet," he chuckled. "Don't talk so loud, then. I--I want you to take me out of here." The man looked at her, through the rosy twilight, in a flattered bewilderment. "Like me as much as that, do you?" he sparred. "You don't understand. Of course, I like you; but what I meant was----" He interrupted her, his fat fingers complacently patting her cheek. "It's not me that don't tumble to the facts," he said; "it's you. I told you I was a family man. I couldn't put you anywhere." "I don't mean that. I mean----" But again he cut in upon her labored explanation, his commercial mind traveling along lines in which it had been forced all his life to travel, and his pride entrenching itself behind the trivial rampart of his income.