had fallen a victim to a white slave trafficker, who had treated her most cruelly and subjected her to unspeakable indignities.  It was only when her “protector” left the city, frightened by the unwonted activity of the police, due to a wave of reform, that she found her way to the rescue home, and in less than five months after the death of her father she had purchased carbolic acid and deliberately “courted death for the nameless child” and herself.

Another experience during which a girl faces a peculiar danger is when she has lost one “job” and is looking for another.  Naturally she loses her place in the slack season and pursues her search at the very moment when positions are hardest to find, and her un-employment is therefore most prolonged.  Perhaps nothing in our social order is so unorganized and inchoate as our method, or rather lack of method, of placing young people in industry.  This is obvious from the point of view of their first positions when they leave school at the unstable age of fourteen, or from the innumerable places they hold later, often as high as ten a year, when they are dismissed or change voluntarily through sheer restlessness.  Here again a girl’s difficulty is often increased by the lack of sympathy and understanding on the part of her parents.  A girl is often afraid to say that she has lost her place and pretends to go to work each morning while she is looking for a new one; she postpones telling them at home day by day, growing more frantic as the usual pay-day approaches.  Some girls borrow from loan sharks in order to take the customary wages to their parents, others fall victims to unscrupulous employment agencies in their eagerness to take the first thing offered.

The majority of these girls answer the advertisements in the daily papers as affording the cheapest and safest way to secure a position.  These out-of-work girls are found, sometimes as many as forty or fifty at a time, in the rest rooms of the department stores, waiting for the new edition of the newspapers after they have been the rounds of the morning advertisements and have found nothing.

Of course such a possible field as these rest rooms is not overlooked by the procurer, who finds it very easy to establish friendly relations through the offer of the latest edition of the newspaper.  Even pennies are precious to a girl out of work and she is also easily grateful to anyone who expresses an interest in her plight and tells her of a position.  Two representatives of the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, during a period of three weeks, arrested and convicted seventeen men and three women who were plying their trades in the rest rooms of nine department stores.  The managers were greatly concerned over this exposure and immediately arranged both for more intelligent matrons and greater vigilance.  One of the less scrupulous stores voluntarily gave up a method of advertising carried on in the rest room itself where a demonstrator from “the beauty counter” made up the faces of the patrons of the rest room with the powder and paint procurable in her department below.  The out-of-work girls especially availed themselves of this privilege and hoped that their search would be easier when their pale, woe-begone faces were “made beautiful.”  The poor girls could not know that a face thus made up enormously increased their risks.