Yet, the magistrate knew only too well the miserable minimum of cases which ever resulted in real rescue and removal from the sordid existence. Once as low as the rail of the Night Court--a girl seldom escaped from the slime into which she had dragged herself. And yet _had_ she dragged herself there? Was _she_ to blame? Was she to pay the consequences in the last Reckoning of Accounts? This thought came to Officer Bobbie Burke as he watched the horrible drama drag monotonously through its brief succession of sordid scenes. The expression of the magistrate, the same look of sympathetic misery on the face of the matron, and even on many of the detectives, automatons who had chanted this same official requiem of dead souls, years of nights ... not a sombre tone of the gruesome picture was lost to Burke's keen eyes. "Some one has to pay; some one has to pay! I wonder who?" muttered Officer 4434 under his breath. There were cases of a different caliber. Yet Burke could see in them what Balzac called "social coordination." Now a middle-aged woman, with hair unkempt, and hat awry, maudlin tears in her swollen eyes, and swaying as she held the rail, looked shiftily up into the magistrate's immobile face. "You've been drunk again, Mrs. Rafferty? This is twice during the last fortnight that I've had you here." "Yis, yer honor, an me wid two foine girls left home. Oh, Saint Mary protect me, an' oi'm a (hic) bad woman. Yer honor, it's the fault of me old man, Pat. (Hic) Oi'm _not_ a bad woman, yer honor." The magistrate was kind as he spoke. "And what does Pat do?" "He beats me, yer honor (hic), until Oi sneak out to the family intrance at the corner fer a quiet nip ter fergit it. An' the girls, they've been supportin' me (hic), an' payin the rint, an' buyin' the vittles, an' (hic) it's a dog's life they lead, wid all their work. When they go out wid dacint young min (hic), Pat cusses the young min, an' beats the girls whin they come home (hic)." Here the woman broke down, sobbing, while the attendant kept her from swaying and falling. "There, there, Mrs. Rafferty. I'll suspend sentence this time. But don't let it happen another time. You have Pat arrested and I'll teach him something about treating you right." "My God, yer honor (hic), the worst of it is it's me two girls--they ain't got no home, but a drunken din, the next thing I knows they'll be arristed (hic) and brought up before ye like these other poor divvels. Yer honor, it's drunken Pats and min like him that's bringin' these poor girls here--it ain't the cops an' the sports (hic), yer honor." The woman staggered as the magistrate quietly signaled the attendant to lead her through the gate, and up the aisle of the court to the outer door. As she passed by the spectators, two or three richly dressed young women giggled and nudged the dapper youths with whom they were sitting.