The New Magdalen

"WHEN your mother was alive were you ever out with her after nightfall

in the streets of a great city?"

In those extraordinary terms Mercy Merrick opened the confidential

interview which Grace Roseberry had forced on her. Grace answered,

simply, "I don't understand you."

"I will put it in another way," said the nurse. Its unnatural hardness

and sternness of tone passed away from her voice, and its native

gentleness and sadness returned, as she made that reply. "You read the

newspapers like the rest of the world," she went on; "have you ever

read of your unhappy fellow-creatures (the starving outcasts of the

population) whom Want has driven into Sin?"

Still wondering, Grace answered that she had read of such things often,

in newspapers and in books.

"Have you heard--when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures

happened to be women--of Refuges established to protect and reclaim

them?"

The wonder in Grace's mind passed away, and a vague suspicion of

something painful to come took its place. "These are extraordinary

questions," she said, nervously. "What do you mean?"

"Answer me," the nurse insisted. "Have you heard of the Refuges? Have

you heard of the Women?"

"Yes."

"Move your chair a little further away from me." She paused. Her voice,

without losing its steadiness, fell to its lowest tones. "_I_ was once

of those women," she said, quietly.

Grace sprang to her feet with a faint cry. She stood petrified--

incapable of uttering a word.

"_I_ have been in a Refuge," pursued the sweet, sad voice of the other

woman. "_I_ have been in a Prison. Do you still wish to be my friend? Do

you still insist on sitting close by me and taking my hand?" She waited

for a reply, and no reply came. "You see you were wrong," she went on,

gently, "when you called me cruel--and I was right when I told you I was

kind."

At that appeal Grace composed herself, and spoke. "I don't wish to

offend you--" she began, confusedly.

Mercy Merrick stopped her there.

"You don't offend me," she said, without the faintest note of

displeasure in her tone. "I am accustomed to stand in the pillory of

my own past life. I sometimes ask myself if it was all my fault. I

sometimes wonder if Society had no duties toward me when I was a child

selling matches in the street--when I was a hard-working girl fainting

at my needle for want of food." Her voice faltered a little for the

first time as it pronounced those words; she waited a moment, and

recovered herself. "It's too late to dwell on these things now," she

said, resignedly. "Society can subscribe to reclaim me; but Society

can't take me back. You see me here in a place of trust--patiently,

humbly, doing all the good I can. It doesn't matter! Here, or elsewhere,

what I _am_ can never alter what I _was_. For three years past all that

a sincerely penitent woman can do I have done. It doesn't matter! Once

let my past story be known, and the shadow of it covers me; the kindest

people shrink."