The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature, undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the town. “There wasn’t any use wasting words when I found he didn’t care for me or for the baby and wouldn’t support us, so I left him,” she said in a level, businesslike way. When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was seven dollars a week. “And so,” she said, “I began going on the street. I knew no one and there was nothing else to do. I couldn’t do that in the town where the boy lived, so I came away. I’ve gone from city to city, working mostly for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the streets. I’m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of them care about me. I don’t like to have them touch me with their hands. I can’t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn’t have married. Not that I minded my husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found there wasn’t anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn’t the strength, and when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about myself--any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.