refused to pay her accumulated wages, on the ground that owing to her ill health she had been of little use during the last year.  When she left the hospital, practically penniless, advised by the physician to find some outdoor work, she sold a patented egg-beater for six months, scarcely earning enough for her barest necessities and in constant dread lest she could not “keep respectable.”  When she was found wandering upon the street she not only had no capital with which to renew her stock, but had been without food for two days and had resolved to drown herself.  Every effort was made to restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunately hospital restraint was not considered necessary, and a month later, in spite of the vigilance of her new employer, her body was taken from the lake.  One more of those gentle spirits who had found the problem of life insoluble, had sought refuge in death.

A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by their lovers.  Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered, and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have elected.  The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl, assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain for another hour in a good home.  In full command of the situation, she usually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparably ruined.  Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnant of that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her own person to protect her home and to secure the status of her children.  The indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint which should have been exercised by the community and which would have naturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it, in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress’s family.  Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child.  The baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells her that upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of the child for a year and that “maybe it won’t live any longer than that,” and unless the hospital is equipped with a social service department, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girl leaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes of her.  It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convinced that