He had been unsteady for many years and the despair of his thoroughly respectable family who had sent him West the year before.  In Arkansas he had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen and married her.  His mother was far from pleased, but had finally sent him money to bring his bride to Chicago, in the hope that he might settle there. En route they stopped at a small town for the naive reason that he wanted to have an aching tooth pulled.  But the tooth gave him an excellent opportunity to have a drink, and before he reached the office of the country practitioner he was intoxicated.  As they passed through the vestibule he stole an overcoat hanging there, although the little wife piteously begged him to let it alone.  Out of sheer bravado he carried it across his arm as they walked down the street, and was, of course, immediately arrested “with the goods upon him.”  In sheer terror of being separated from her husband, the wife insisted that she had been an accomplice, and together they were put into the county jail awaiting the action of the Grand Jury.  At the end of the sixth week, on one of the rare occasions when they were permitted to talk to each other through the grating which separated the men’s visiting quarters from the women’s, the young wife told her husband that she made up her mind to swear that she had stolen the overcoat.  What could she do if he were sent to prison and she were left free?  She was afraid to go to his people and could not possibly go back to hers.  In spite of his protest, that very night she sent for the state’s attorney and made a full confession, giving her age as eighteen in the hope of making her testimony more valuable.  From that time on they stuck to the lie through the indictment, the trial and her conviction.  Apparently it had seemed to him only a well-arranged plot until he had visited the penitentiary the day before, and had really seen her piteous plight.  Remorse had seized him at last, and he was ready to make every restitution.  She, however, had no notion of giving up—­on the contrary, as she realized more clearly what prison life meant, she was daily more determined to spare him the experience.  Her letters, written in the unformed hand of a child—­for her husband had himself taught her to read and write—­were filled with a riot of self-abnegation, the martyr’s joy as he feels the iron enter the flesh.  Thus had an illiterate, neglected girl through sheer devotion to a worthless sort of young fellow inclined to drink, entered into that noble company of martyrs.

When girls “go wrong” what happens?  How has this tremendous force, valuable and necessary for the foundation of the family, become misdirected?  When its manifestations follow the legitimate channels of wedded life we call them praiseworthy; but there are other manifestations quite outside the legal and moral channels which yet compel our admiration.