Moreover, although Miss Robins’ experience in working for women and the woman’s cause in England had brought to her knowledge many life histories more unspeakable than this, after she had finished this book she said to herself, “Now here is a story that I know to be absolutely true, but how valuable is it to give to the world an individual instance of this kind; how far can it be generalized?” To test this she went, with that sincerity of spirit that characterizes all she does, to a noted police justice in London and laid the story before him, asking him what he would do if a person came to him with such a story. He answered sadly, with no show of being at all roused by anything unusual, that he would begin to take evidence immediately and see what he could do about it. He added that the story was really a commonplace. Such is the reticence of the English press, and such is the stern family pride concerning the “blot on the scutcheon,” and all those traditions which grow out of the double moral standard whereby the escapade of the son of the house can even be repeated lightly while the slightest shadow on the name of the daughter is an unspeakable disgrace, that no one knows how many tragedies of this kind are hidden from sight in the records of numerous respectable families. To satisfy herself more completely that the story was susceptible of extensive application, Miss Robins took it to several London police inspectors. No one for a moment stopped to doubt or question the facts. The most horrible stories that the human mind can conceive are old stories to them. When the Home Secretary was asked a question on this subject in the House of Commons only a few weeks ago, he answered that in London city alone, to his knowledge, there had been reported fifty-three girls lost and never heard of within a few months. Such facts as this explain the tragic intensity with which the book is written. Danger! Danger! Danger! That is the dominant note that sounds throughout the narrative. How pathetically the mother’s poignant fears contrast with her ineffectiveness. Ever this haunting danger, whether mother and daughters are walking in the sunset, or planting in the garden, or sitting by the hearth. What a wonderful picture Miss Robins gives of the mother’s desperate dependence on the four walls of her home—“Soon home, now, little girl, soon safe in our dear home.” The danger signal of the night-bird’s note is introduced with inimitable art—a subtle suggestion, even in those early days, of the gray hawk whose shadow hovers over bright young lives.