All this she realized at an age when strong impressions are indelibly
retained. Her value, the tremendous value of an unsmirched virtue, a
woman's greatest asset in a world of desire and barter, became to her a
possession she cherished above her jewels, above the money she could
earn and save and the greater sums she dreamed of earning or winning by
any means--all means but one.
Her observations of the women about her who gave all for so little, her
meditations upon them, and the conclusions she drew from their maimed
lives only emphasized the resisting force of her nature. She was not
born to be a leaf in the current, whirled by the force of waters into a
safe haven or an engulfing whirlpool as chance might decide; she must
dominate the currents.
And with the temptations of her youth, and her ardent emotional
temperament, would also come the remembrance of those haggard girls with
their pinched blue lips, the suffering in their eyes, their delicate
faces aged and yellowed and lined and spoiled, weeping with shaking
sobs, telling her pitiful stories, and begging her for money, for a word
with the management. And, when they had gone, she had turned to her
looking-glass and gazed at herself with conscious pride and delight.
Contempt, not pity, stirred her heart for the draggled butterflies whose
gauzy irridescence was but for a moment; and before her mirror she
constantly renewed her vows that never would she barter her bloom, her
freshness, her exquisite grace for what those girls had to show.
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