I looked at the occupant of cot No. 11 with mingled feelings of pity and amazement--pity for the hopelessness of her case, now more apparent than ever; amazement at her keen and morbid generalizations. "How old are you, Eunice?" "Twenty-four," she replied--"oh, I know what you're going to say: that I have my whole life before me, and all that. But I haven't. My life is all behind me." "'I am the Captain of my Soul, I am the Master of my Fate,'" I quoted. "Yes, you are; but I am not," she replied simply, and turned and looked at me with her hopeless eyes. Poor, unfortunate Eunice! That night, as we walked home together, she revealed a little more about herself by telling me that she had recently been discharged from the hospital on "the Island." I did not need to inquire the nature of the illness that had left her face so white and drawn. Brief as my experience had been among the humble inmates of the "home," I had learned the expediency of not being too solicitous regarding the precise facts of such cases. The next day was Saturday, and still no Bessie. As we worked we speculated as to her absence, and decided to spend the afternoon looking her up. Meanwhile, although I had been managing to do my work a little better each day, Eunice had not been succeeding so well. Her apathy had been increasing daily, until she had lost any interest she might ever have had in trying to do her work well. On this morning the forewoman was obliged to give her repeated and sharp reproofs for soiling her materials and for dawdling over her work. "You seem to like to work," Eunice said once, breaking a long silence. "Not any better than you do, only I've got to, and I try to make the best of it." "Yes, you do. You like to work, and I don't, and that's the difference between us. And it's all the difference in the world, too. If I liked work for its own sake, like you do, there'd be some hope for me living things down." "I wonder," she whispered, again breaking a long silence--"I wonder if Bessie had any man after her." I looked up suddenly, perhaps indignantly, and my reply was not encouraging to any conjectures along this line, as Eunice saw quickly. "I'm sorry I offended you," she added hastily; "but I didn't think anything wrong of Bessie--you know I didn't. Only I've watched the boss following her around with his eyes ever since we came here to work. You didn't see, for you don't know as much about their devilment as I do; but I tell you, if anything was ever to happen that poor little girl through any man, I'd choke him to death with my own hands!" The satin-tufted box she was working on dropped from her fingers and clattered on the floor, bringing the forewoman down upon her with many caustic remarks. When the flurry was over I assured her that I thought Bessie fully capable of taking care of herself, although I had seen more of the manager's advances than Eunice gave me credit for observing.