and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced
these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a
disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have
elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl,
assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain
for another hour in a good home. In full command of the situation, she
usually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparably
ruined. Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnant
of that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her own
person to protect her home and to secure the status of her children. The
indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint which
should have been exercised by the community and which would have
naturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it,
in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress's family.
Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks
after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the
ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the
poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the
great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child. The
baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells her
that upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of
the child for a year and that "maybe it won't live any longer than
that," and unless the hospital is equipped with a social service
department, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girl
leaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes of
her. It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convinced
that all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputable
house. Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not be
despised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support of
her child. Often she has received the address of such a house from one