Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/39

 And, to tell the truth, he was suddenly impatient with her—as impatient as an old convict when the quiet of his cell is disturbed by the inevitable tragedy and useless despair of a new-comer. He had received her as a girl of the streets, a fellow life-timer in that underworld to which he had resigned himself, working and writing with no ambition to escape, but merely to obtain food and a bed. He had helped her, in the expectation that as soon as she had been fed and warmed she would go off to serve her own sentence without troubling him further. But this weeping helplessness!

He began to question her, sitting in his chair, his hands thrust into his trousers pockets, his legs stretched out before him, his eyes on his wet feet. Where had she come from? Why didn't she go back? What had she been working at? Hadn't she any relatives to help her?

And the girl, aware of his change of voice, began to defend herself, to explain her willingness to do anything—anything—and, finally, to uncover, abjectly, the whole lacerating story of her misfortunes, her struggles, the injustices that had been done her, the ignominy, the misery, the suffering, the shame. It was a common enough story. There was nothing new in it to Carey. He listened as wearily as a physician hearing of pain. And the girl kept sobbing, at the end of each successive chapter of her degradation: "It was worse than the life of a dog." And, "If I'd been a dog he'd have