On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many immigrant girls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist all temptations.  Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsome girl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which a continued mood of introspection so often lends to the young.  Olga had been in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned to Sweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to be thoroughly respectable.  But a friendless girl of such striking beauty could not escape the machinations of those who profit by the sale of girls.  Almost immediately Olga found herself beset by two young men who continually forced themselves upon her attention, although she refused all their invitations to shows and dances.  In six months the frightened girl had changed her boarding-place four times, hoping that the men would not be able to follow her.  She was also obliged constantly to look for a cheaper place, because the dull season in the cloak-making trade came early that year.  In the fifth boarding-house she finally found herself so hopelessly in arrears that the landlady, tired of waiting for the “new cloak making to begin,” at length fulfilled a long-promised threat, and one summer evening at nine o’clock literally put Olga into the street, retaining her trunk in payment of the debt.  The girl walked the street for hours, until she fancied that she saw one of her persecutors in the distance, when she hastily took refuge in a sheltered doorway, crouching in terror.  Although no one approached her, she sat there late into the night, apparently too apathetic to move.  With the curious inconsequence of moody youth, she was not aroused to action by the situation in which she found herself.  The incident epitomized to her the everlasting riddle of the universe to which she could see no solution and she drearily decided to throw herself into the lake.  As she left the doorway at daybreak for this pitiful purpose, she attracted the attention of a passing policeman.  In response to his questions, kindly at first but becoming exasperated as he was convinced that she was either “touched in her wits” or “guying” him, he obtained a confused story of the persecutions of the two young men, and in sheer bewilderment he finally took her to the station on the very charge against the thought of which she had so long contended.

The girl was doubtless sullen in court the next morning; she was resentful of the policeman’s talk, she was oppressed and discouraged and therefore taciturn.  She herself said afterwards that she “often got still that way.”  She so sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after her long struggle for respectability, that she gave a false name and became involved in a story to which she could devote but half her attention, being still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative thought which continually broke through the flimsy tale she was fabricating.