The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets | Page 8

had seen her the day before, and though she
had been there only a month he was convinced that she was developing
consumption. She was "only seventeen, and couldn't stand the hard
work and the 'low down' women" whom she had for companions. My
remark that a girl of seventeen was too young to be in the state
penitentiary brought out the whole wretched story.
He had been unsteady for many years and the despair of his thoroughly
respectable family who had sent him West the year before. In Arkansas
he had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen and married her. His mother
was far from pleased, but had finally sent him money to bring his bride
to Chicago, in the hope that he might settle there. En route they stopped
at a small town for the naïve reason that he wanted to have an aching
tooth pulled. But the tooth gave him an excellent opportunity to have a
drink, and before he reached the office of the country practitioner he
was intoxicated. As they passed through the vestibule he stole an
overcoat hanging there, although the little wife piteously begged him to
let it alone. Out of sheer bravado he carried it across his arm as they
walked down the street, and was, of course, immediately arrested "with

the goods upon him." In sheer terror of being separated from her
husband, the wife insisted that she had been an accomplice, and
together they were put into the county jail awaiting the action of the
Grand Jury. At the end of the sixth week, on one of the rare occasions
when they were permitted to talk to each other through the grating
which separated the men's visiting quarters from the women's, the
young wife told her husband that she made up her mind to swear that
she had stolen the overcoat. What could she do if he were sent to prison
and she were left free? She was afraid to go to his people and could not
possibly go back to hers. In spite of his protest, that very night she sent
for the state's attorney and made a full confession, giving her age as
eighteen in the hope of making her testimony more valuable. From that
time on they stuck to the lie through the indictment, the trial and her
conviction. Apparently it had seemed to him only a well-arranged plot
until he had visited the penitentiary the day before, and had really seen
her piteous plight. Remorse had seized him at last, and he was ready to
make every restitution. She, however, had no notion of giving up--on
the contrary, as she realized more clearly what prison life meant, she
was daily more determined to spare him the experience. Her letters,
written in the unformed hand of a child--for her husband had himself
taught her to read and write--were filled with a riot of self-abnegation,
the martyr's joy as he feels the iron enter the flesh. Thus had an
illiterate, neglected girl through sheer devotion to a worthless sort of
young fellow inclined to drink, entered into that noble company of
martyrs.
When girls "go wrong" what happens? How has this tremendous force,
valuable and necessary for the foundation of the family, become
misdirected? When its manifestations follow the legitimate channels of
wedded life we call them praiseworthy; but there are other
manifestations quite outside the legal and moral channels which yet
compel our admiration.
A young woman of my acquaintance was married to a professional
criminal named Joe. Three months after the wedding he was arrested
and "sent up" for two years. Molly had always been accustomed to
many lovers, but she remained faithful to her absent husband for a year.

At the end of that time she obtained a divorce which the state law
makes easy for the wife of a convict, and married a man who was "rich
and respectable"--in fact, he owned the small manufacturing
establishment in which her mother did the scrubbing. He moved his
bride to another part of town six miles away, provided her with a
"steam-heated flat," furniture upholstered in "cut velvet," and many
other luxuries of which Molly heretofore had only dreamed. One day as
she was wheeling a handsome baby carriage up and down the
prosperous street, her brother, who was "Joe's pal," came to tell her that
Joe was "out," had come to the old tenement and was "mighty sore"
because "she had gone back on him." Without a moment's hesitation
Molly turned the baby carriage in the direction of her old home and
never stopped wheeling it until she had compassed the entire six miles.
She and Joe rented the old room and went to housekeeping. The rich
and respectable husband made every effort to persuade