"How do you like the new girl? She's here all alone." I am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation. When I return the cook lectures me in this way: "Here alone, are you?" "Yes." "Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get along nicely and not kill yourself with work either. Just stick at it and they'll do right by you. Lots o' girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. Now I like everybody to have a good time, and I hope you'll have a good time, too, but you mustn't carry it too far." My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night before with a working-girl at my boarding-house. "Where is your home?" I asked. She had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to take a rest. She looked at me skeptically. "We don't have no homes," was her answer. "We just get up and get whenever they send us along." And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two sad cases that had come close to my notice as fellow boarders. I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour. The matron had gone out and left me to "answer the door." The bell rang and I opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and sleet about on the winter air. A young girl came in; she was seeking a lodging. Her skirts and shoes were heavy with water. She took off her things slowly in a dazed manner. Her short, quick breathing showed how excited she was. When she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her eyes moved about restlessly. She stopped abruptly now and then and contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she continued in the same broken, husky voice: "I suppose I'm not the only one in trouble. I've thought a thousand times over that I would kill myself. I suppose I loved him--but I _hate_ him now." These two sentences, recurring, were the story's all. The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was pleasure had been shared--these were the thoughts and feelings breeding hatred. She had spent the day in a fruitless search for her lover. She had been to his boss and to his rooms. He had paid his debts and gone, nobody knew where. She was pretty, vain, homeless; alone to bear the responsibility she had not been alone to incur. She could not shirk it as the man had done. They had both disregarded the law. On whom were the consequences weighing more heavily? On the woman. She is the sufferer; she is the first to miss the law's protection. She is the weaker member whom, for the sake of the race, society protects. Nature has made her man's physical inferior; society is obliged to recognize this in the giving of a marriage law which beyond doubt is for the benefit of woman, since she can least afford to disregard it.