Page:Bambi (1914).djvu/228

206 She outlined the work done in that farm home, which is such a credit to New York. She told him of the honour system, and all the modern methods employed there.

“Can you get opportunities for girls who want the chance?”

“Plenty of them. I have only to ask. When I need money, it comes. Lots of my girls are employed in uptown shops, leading good, hard-working lives.”

“Where does this money come from?”

“Private donations. That is one of my hope signs—the widespread interest in rescue work.”

“The old ones—those aged women?”

She sighed. “Yes, I know, they are terrible! There is a mighty army of them in New York. We grind them in and out of our courts, month after month. The institutions are all full. There is so much grafting that the poor-farm has been delayed, year after year, so there is no place to send them.”

“Where do they go?”

“Into East River, most of them, in the end.”

“Do you mean to say that we pay the machinery of the law to put these cases through the courts, over and over again, and then provide no place to harbour the derelicts?”