"I know her," said Carrie. "A year ago she came to New York from the country to find work. When she was about starved, she rang a bell under the sign 'Helping Hand Home'--she didn't know what that meant except that it meant charity. The superintendent told her his place couldn't do anything for her; she might be spoiled by associating with the people he helped; his mission was for bad women that were sorry; not for good women that hadn't anything to be sorry about. 'But I'm hungry,' she told him. 'Can't help it,' he said; 'you're not qualified.' This girl went away, and came back a month later. 'I don't want to come in just yet,' she said; 'but I do want to tell you that I'm qualified now'--and she was." Katie took the facts for what, amid surroundings where such facts are plentiful, they seemed worth. "Hard luck," she said, though not without meaning. "Yes, and look at her clothes." "That's the trouble," said Katie; "we can't help lookin' at them--the likes of us--any more than she can help wearin' them. It's that or a tenement with two dark rooms an' the rent raised every year." They danced, for among the soberer men there were many that knew them, and neither girl remembered the weariness of her work in the exhaustion of her dancing. Between dances, in the dressing-room, they talked with their acquaintances among the girls, gossiping of the men and the other women, and now and then, their throats dry and their faces streaming, they were taken into the dingy side-bar and were bought a glass of beer. As midnight drew closer the dance became more stormy. Many of the working-girls went home, and their places were filled by women of the brighter dressed class. There were some that were plainly drunk, and these clumsily imitated the suggestive contortions of the salaried dancers now sent upon the floor to stimulate the amateurs. One girl, in a cleared space surrounded by laughing men and envious, though apparently scornful, women, performed a dance popularly supposed to be forbidden by the police. There were several fights, and in one especially nasty scuffle a lad was badly cut by the knife of a jealous partner. "I guess that's about plenty for us," observed Katie, as she and Carrie shouldered their way from the crowd surrounding the wounded boy and his shrieking assailant. Both girls were sufficiently familiar with such episodes to accept them with calm, but both were at last tired out. "I suppose you're right," Carrie assented, "though I did have a good time." "An' it was you didn't want to come!" grinned Katie as they went out upon the cool street. "I know." Carrie's round face grew hard and puzzled. "I know," she admitted, "only sometimes----" "Och, come on, an' cheer up! We must write our letter for the brewery-man before we get to bed, Carrie-girl." They did write it, but Carrie, when she had gone into her own room for the last night she was to spend there, sat for some time motionless upon the edge of the cot.