He went out, still smiling, and, as he did so, Violet saw Rose, after stooping hurriedly, place in his hands a yellow bill. As the door closed, there came into the younger woman's eyes the question that she would not have dared to ask. "Yep," nodded Rose, "that's my week's pay for what they call protection." "Isn't he afraid to take it?" Violet, thus encouraged, inquired. "The man above him isn't afraid to take two-thirds of it," said Rose, "an' the best of it goes past him to the district boss--it's the regular system with the regular prices. Oh, no, he ain't afraid; an' if you ever tried to live on a copper's pay, you'd soon be afraid not to take it." Violet, returning to the parlor, bit her lip: there was indeed small help to be had from the law. Small help, either there or elsewhere. She turned, naturally, only to the seemingly more prosperous customers, but, even by them, she was met with smiling incredulity: her story was so hackneyed that it could not be true. "It's all right enough to want to get out of here," said her sagest adviser, who at least paid her the rare compliment of credence; "but how are you going to live after you get out? You can't go home; you haven't got any trade; you can't cook; without a recommendation you can't get even a job at general housework or in a factory." He was a quiet, middle-aged widower that said this, an infrequent visitor, a chief clerk in one of the departments of a large insurance company, with a reputation for liberal kindliness at Rose's and, in his own little world, a position of some influence. "You get me out," said Violet, "an' I'll do the rest." But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry--she saw that; but what could he do? It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred. Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good family and bad morals. "We are getting so confounded poor," he used to say, "that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this uncertain life." Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial rôle--the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and too much ancestry to marry one.