if she were discharging a duty not to be gainsaid, not to be thwarted by any difficulty, not even the realization that all the effort must be ultimately in vain.

"Do you know how we girls live?--but, of course, you don't. Three of us in one room, doing our own cooking over the two-burner gas-stove, and our own washing and ironing evenings, after being on our feet for nine hours."

The enumeration of the sordid details left the employer absolutely unmoved, since he lacked the imagination necessary to sympathize actually with the straining evil of a life such as the girl had known. Indeed, he spoke with an air of just remonstrance, as if the girl's charges were mischievously faulty.

"I have provided chairs behind the counters," he stated.

There was no especial change in the girl's voice as she answered his defense. It continued musically low, but there was in it the insistent note of sincerity.

"But have you ever seen a girl sitting in one of them?" she questioned, coldly. "Please answer me. Have you? Of course not," she said, after a little pause during which the owner had remained silent. She shook her head in emphatic negation. "And do you understand why? It's simply because every girl knows that the manager of her department would think he could get along without her, if he were to see her sitting down ----loafing, you know! So, she would be discharged. All it amounts to is that, after being on her feet for nine hours, the girl usually walks home, in order to save carfare. Yes, she walks, whether sick or well. Anyhow, you are generally so tired, it don't make much difference which you are."

Gilder was fuming under these strictures, which seemed to him altogether baseless attacks on himself. His exasperation steadily waxed against the girl, a convicted felon, who thus had the audacity to beard him.

"What has all this to do with the question of theft in the store?" he rumbled, huffily. "That was the excuse for your coming here. And, instead of telling me something, you rant about gas-stoves and carfare."The inexorable voice went on in its monotone, as if he had not spoken. 

"And, when you are really sick, and have to stop work, what are you going to do then? Do you know, Mr. Gilder, that the first time a straight girl steals, it's often because she had to have a doctor--or some luxury like that? And some of them do worse than steal. Yes, they do--girls that started 

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