Her tall, almost thin, figure was draped in a soiled pink kimona; her yellow hair seemed merely to have been tossed upon her head and to have been left precisely as it happened to alight; her blue eyes were dull, and her hard, narrow face, with its spots of high color over the cheek-bones, showed more plainly than common, the usually faint little red veins that lay close below its white skin. "My Gawd," she sighed, as she sank upon the bed and curled up at its foot, "there are some things I can't get accustomed to, and that"--she nodded in the direction whence the cry had come--"that's one of them." She spoke in a weary voice, a voice with almost no animation, but with a curious mixture of the cockney of the New Yorker and with a rising inflection that saved what she said from monotony. "What was it?" asked Violet. "You ought to know. It was another of them." "You mean----" The question trailed into nothingness on Violet's whitening lips. "Yes," said Evelyn, seizing a pillow and snuggling her broad shoulders against it. "Got a cig?" And then, as her hostess produced a box from under the mattress: "It does so get upon my nerves. Why, sometimes they come here young enough to play with dollies. This time there was no more sleep for boiby. Had to run downstairs and rig a B. and S., and then come up to girlie here for company." "How--how did this happen?" "How the deuce do you suppose? One story is pretty much all of them, my dear, and one about as narsty as the others." "But this?" "Oh, this broke me up just because I had the bad luck to hear the details, though I must say I've heard the same details often enough before. Her people lived in a tenement in Essex Street, where it's so crowded that the men have to come outside every evening while their wives cook the dinners--three nine-by-seven rooms, no barth and no privacy; four children from eighteen to ten in one room; pa, ma, the boiby, and the seven-year-old in the second, and the cot in the kitchen-living-room rented to the lodger. The lodger was the wiggly snake under the apple-tree." "He brought her here?" "Gave her, as you might say, the general directions. But she'd have come along of her own self sometime." "How could she?" "How couldn't she, you mean! Those tenements are not for living in--there isn't room for that--they're just to eat in, when you've got enough, and sleep in, when you can sleep, and die in, when you have to." "So this girl had to live outside?" "On the doorsteps and the roofs when it was hot, and walking up and down the street when it wasn't." Violet remembered her own home, and reflected that her excuse was less, because her surroundings had been better. "That must have been pretty bad," she said.