and dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water. Often
the entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arranged
intermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has brought
together. After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer,
who is often in league with the "spieler" who frequents the dance hall,
is comparatively easy. He assumes one of two rôles, that of the
sympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover. In the character
of the former, he tells "the down-trodden working girl" that her wages
are a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her with
higher wages if she will trust him. He often makes allusions to the
shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it "a shame that
such a pretty girl cannot dress better." In the second rôle he
apparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents,
complaining that they want him to marry, "a society swell," but that he
really prefers a working girl like herself. In either case he
establishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind, through the
excitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimate
understanding and protection.

Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with him for a restaurant
because, as he truthfully says, she is exhausted and in need of food. At
the supper, however, she drinks much more, and it is not surprising that
she is at last persuaded that it is too late to go home and in the end
consents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby lodging house. Six
young girls, each accompanied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, were
recently followed to a chop suey restaurant and then to a lodging-house,
which the police were instigated to raid and where the six girls, more
or less intoxicated, were found. If no one rescues the girl after such
an experience, she sometimes does not return home at all, or if she
does, feels herself initiated into a new world where it is possible to