Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/292

 had earned for him the plaudits of many of his fellow citizens and citizenesses. And so he came. He was a social worker, as they are called, and had had the training in settlement work which is said to qualify young persons to deal professionally with the poor and wicked. He was a rather good looking young chap, with a smile about his full red lips, who lifted his mild eyes to yours with perhaps an effort at frankness too pronounced. He spoke well and fluently.

One night (he said) at the close of a hard day's work in his mission, a man came to him in evident distress. The man was a business man, in comfortable though modest circumstances, with a family of which perhaps the most interesting member was a beautiful girl of seventeen. The girl was attending a high school, where she was in one of the advanced classes, and the evening before had gone from school to spend the night at the home of a friend, a girl of her own age. The next evening, on her failure to return home, the parents became alarmed, and after unavailing inquiry at her schoolmate's house, and in other quarters, the distraught father had appealed to the social worker. The social worker at once caused an investigation to be made, and by a process of elimination (as he said, though unlike Sherlock Holmes, he did not detail the successive steps of his logic), he concluded that the girl was in a certain quarter of the city, in fact in a certain street. He then sent for the father, told him to supply himself with sufficient money, instructed him in the part he was to play, and was careful to stipulate that if he,