“I generally get home by eleven or twelve o’clock, sometimes I stay all night. I never have visitors here; I never go with but one man in a night. No one here knows me. What people don’t know won’t hurt them. I generally go to a hotel. Most decent men would rather go to a hotel and pay the extra price for a room. Such hotels are not apt to be raided. I don’t long for the life at all. I cared for that one man. I mean to save money and I am a little ahead. We don’t hate the men half as much as we hate ourselves. They could stop before it was too late if any one would really sympathize with their love of freedom and understand them. Social workers say, “I want to help you”; they just preach. Many of them are women of education. They expect a girl to know all that they know with their years of experience when she is just ignorant. What can she know of herself and men and the world? Things are all wrong between men and women—I don’t know why. People with education ought to think about it. More than half the men we girls meet are married men. The women get tired of their husbands; the husbands get tired of them. Sometimes the wives are sick, sometimes they don’t understand a man’s nature; they are cold and unsympathetic and drive them to girls like us. “I pretend as far as I can. One might as well do it in the same spirit as any other distasteful work. It may wear out one’s soul but it doesn’t wear out one’s body as much as house work or factory or store work. I haven’t been to church in seven years. I can’t believe much in God. It’s hard to see the justice in anything and the so-called good people think they are so perfect.” This woman with all her hardness and bitterness cries when she speaks of her child. When I came away she acted the hostess very prettily, picked up my books for me, and showed a gentle side of her nature. “No, I haven’t minded talking of myself,” she said. “Please come again. I have no real friends—you will always find me here alone, and sad.”[84] Pregnancy and illegal motherhood are among the most tragic of all situations and tend to deprive the girl of her sense of worth, to isolate her socially, and to handicap her economically. But when the girl is not already prepared for demoralization the recuperation in these cases is greater than we should expect. It is a disaster like other disasters, such as sickness and loss of fortune, and a reconstruction of life may follow, perhaps on a lower level. The attitude toward an otherwise orderly girl who has had a sexual experience or borne a child is not so severe as formerly. Frequently the girl marries, often she marries the father of the child. In his study of five hundred unmarried mothers Kammerer says: