Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

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The incident from which this burst of friendship seemed to take its rise was this. One day shortly after he arrived he gave me a small clipping concerning a girl on the south side who had run away or had been kidnaped from one of the dreariest homes it has ever been my lot to see. The girl was a hardy Irish creature of about sixteen. A neighborhood street boy had taken her to some wretched dive in South Clark Street and seduced her. Her mother, an old, Irish Catholic woman whom I found bending over a washtub when I called, was greatly exercised as to what had become of her daughter, of whom she had heard nothing since her disappearance. The police had been informed, and from clews picked up by a detective I learned the facts first mentioned. The mother wept into her wash as she told me of the death of her husband a few years before, of a boy who had been injured in such a way that he could not work, and now this girl, her last hope——

From a newspaper point of view there was nothing much to the story, but I decided to follow it to the end. I found the house to which the boy had taken the girl, but they had just left. I found the parents of the youth, simple, plain working people, who knew nothing of his whereabouts. Something about the wretched little homes of both families, the tumbledown neighborhoods, the poverty and privation which would ill become a pretty sensuous girl, impelled me to write it out as I saw and felt it. I hurried back to the office that afternoon and scribbled out a kind of slum romance, which in the course of the night seemed to take the office by storm. Maxwell, who read it, scowled at first, then said it was interesting, and then fine.