Page:Gissing - The Unclassed, vol. I, 1884.djvu/66

 “Then I shall go on the streets!” she exclaimed, passionately. “There’s nothing else left for me.”

“You can go where you please,” returned Abraham.

To do her justice, she did not take this course at once. She tried to obtain work, but was far too weak to succeed in this attempt, the hardest of all tasks in our most humanitarian age. She got into debt with her landlady, and only took the inevitable step when at length absolutely turned adrift.

That was not quite ten years gone by; she was then but eighteen. Let her have lost her child, and she would speedily have fallen into the last stages of degradation. But the little one lived. She had called it Ida, a name chosen from some tale in the penny weeklies which were the solace of her misery. She herself took the name of Starr, that being the name she would have borne, had Ida’s father dealt honestly with her. Poor thing, she had a hard, hard problem before her, and the success with which she managed to solve it might, perhaps, make some claim upon