The girl of the crowded tenements has no room in which to receive her friends or to read the books through which she shares the lives of assorted heroines, or, better still, dreams of them as of herself.  Even if the living-room is not full of boarders or children or washing, it is comfortable neither for receiving friends nor for reading, and she finds upon the street her entire social field; the shop windows with their desirable garments hastily clothe her heroines as they travel the old roads of romance, the street cars rumbling noisily by suggest a delectable somewhere far away, and the young men who pass offer possibilities of the most delightful acquaintance.  It is not astonishing that she insists upon clothing which conforms to the ideals of this all-absorbing street and that she will unhesitatingly deceive an uncomprehending family which does not recognize its importance.

One such girl had for two years earned money for clothing by filling regular appointments in a disreputable saloon between the hours of six and half-past seven in the evening.  With this money earned almost daily she bought the clothes of her heart’s desire, keeping them with the saloon-keeper’s wife.  She demurely returned to her family for supper in her shabby working clothes and presented her mother with her unopened pay envelope every Saturday night.  She began this life at the age of fourteen after her Polish mother had beaten her because she had “elbowed” the sleeves and “cut out” the neck of her ungainly calico gown in a vain attempt to make it look “American.”  Her mother, who had so conscientiously punished a daughter who was “too crazy for clothes,” could never of course comprehend how dangerous a combination is the girl with an unsatisfied love for finery and the opportunities for illicit earning afforded on the street.  Yet many sad cases may be traced to such lack of comprehension.  Charles Booth states that in England a large proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle classes, are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own daughters, a result doubtless of the early freedom of the street accorded city children.  Too often the mothers themselves are totally ignorant of covert dangers.  A few days ago I held in my hand a pathetic little pile of letters written by a desperate young girl of fifteen before she attempted to commit suicide.  These letters were addressed to her lover, her girl friends, and to the head of the rescue home, but none to her mother towards whom she felt a bitter resentment “because she did not warn me.”  The poor mother after the death of her husband had gone to live with a married daughter, but as the son-in-law would not “take in two” she had told the youngest daughter, who had already worked for a year as an apprentice in a dressmaking establishment, that she must find a place to live with one of her girl friends.  The poor child had found this impossible, and three days after the breaking up of her home she