Most of the cases of economic responsibility, however, are not due to chivalric devotion, but arise from a desire to fulfill family obligations such as would be accepted by any conscientious girl.  This was clearly revealed in conversations which were recently held with thirty-four girls, who were living at the same time in a rescue home, when twenty-two of them gave economic pressure as the reason for choosing the life which they had so recently abandoned.  One piteous little widow of seventeen had been supporting her child and had been able to leave the life she had been leading only because her married sister offered to take care of the baby without the money formerly paid her.  Another had been supporting her mother and only since her recent death was the girl sure that she could live honestly because she had only herself to care for.

The following story, fairly typical of the twenty-two involving economic reasons, is of a girl who had come to Chicago at the age of fifteen, from a small town in Indiana.  Her father was too old to work and her mother was a dependent invalid.  The brother who cared for the parents, with the help of the girl’s own slender wages earned in the country store of the little town, became ill with rheumatism.  In her desire to earn more money the country girl came to the nearest large city, Chicago, to work in a department store.  The highest wage she could earn, even though she wore long dresses and called herself “experienced,” was five dollars a week.  This sum was of course inadequate even for her own needs and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for “the folks at home.”  In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was “wise” showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by making appointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels.  Having earned money in this way for a few months, the young girl made an arrangement with an older woman to be on call in the evenings whenever she was summoned by telephone, thus joining that large clandestine group of apparently respectable girls, most of whom yield to temptation only when hard pressed by debt incurred during illness or non-employment, or when they are facing some immediate necessity.  This practice has become so general in the larger American cities as to be systematically conducted.  It is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the economic pressure, unless one cites its corollary—­the condition of thousands of young men whose low salaries so cruelly and unjustifiably postpone their marriages.  For a long time the young saleswoman kept her position in the department store, retaining her honest wages for herself, but sending everything else to her family.  At length however, she changed from her clandestine life to an openly professional one when she needed enough money to send her brother to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she maintained him for a year.  She explained that because he was now restored to health and able to support the family once more, she had left the life “forever and ever”, expecting to return to her home in Indiana.  She suspected that her brother knew of her experience, although she was sure that her parents did not, and she hoped that as she was not yet seventeen, she might be able to make a fresh start.  Fortunately the poor child did not know how difficult that would be.