without labor, sustained by her great beauty and her fine nature
alone. She had taken her place in the salons of the rich and great
without laying for her admittance with her honor or her good name.
Yet no one could say whence she came, though people whispered that
it was from the depths.

As a waif of a Parisian faubourg, she had starved through her
childhood among surroundings of vice and poverty, such as those
only can conceive who know them by experience. Those of us who get
our knowledge from books and from hearsay have to strain our
imagination in order to form an idea of the hereditary misery of a
great city, and yet our most terrible imaginings are apt to pale
before the reality.

It had been only a question of time when vice should get its
clutches upon her, as a cog-wheel seizes whoever comes too near the
machine. After whirling her around through a short life of shame
and degradation, it would, with mechanical punctuality, have cast
her off into some corner, there to drag out to the end, in sordid
obscurity, her caricature of an existence.

But it happened, as it does sometimes happen, that she was
"discovered" by a man of wealth and position, one day when, a child
of fourteen, she happened to cross one of the better streets. She
was on her way to a dark back room in the Rue des Quatre Vents,
where she worked with a woman who made artificial flowers.

It was not only her extraordinary beauty that attracted her patron;
her movements, her whole bearing, and the expression of her
half-formed features, all seemed to him to show that here was an