"Sick?" she said. "Hell!" (Marija had learned to
scatter her conversation with as many oaths as a longshore~
man or a mule driver.) "How can I ever be anything but
sick, at this life?"

She fell silent for a moment, staring ahead of her gloom~
ily. "It's morphine," she said, at last. "I seem to take
more of it every day."

"What's that for?" he asked.

"It's the way of it; I don't know why. If it isn't that,
it's drink. If the girls didn't booze they couldn't stand it
any time at all. And the madame always gives them dope
when they first come, and they learn to like it; or else they
take it for headaches and such things, and get the habit
that way. I've got it, I know; I've tried to quit, but I
never will while I'm here."

"How long are you going to stay?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "Always, I guess. What
else could I do?"

"Don't you save any money?"

"Save!" said Marija. "Good Lord, no! I get enough,
I suppose, but it all goes. I get a half share, two dollars
and a half for each customer, and sometimes I make twenty-
five or thirty dollars a night, and you'd think I ought to
save something out of that! But then I am charged for
my room and my meals -- and such prices as you never
heard of; and then for extras, and drinks -- for everything
I get, and some I don't. My laundry bill is nearly twenty
dollars each week alone -- think of that! Yet what can I
do? I either have to stand it or quit, and it would be the
same anywhere else. It's all I can do to save the fifteen
dollars I give Elzbieta each week, so the children can go to
school."

Marija sat brooding in silence for a while; then, seeing
that Jurgis was interested, she went on: "That's the way
they keep the girls -- they let them run up debts, so they
can't get away. A young girl comes from abroad, and she
doesn't know a word of English, and she gets into a place
like this, and when she wants to go the madame shows her
that she is a couple of hundred dollars in debt, and takes

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p351 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p352w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p353

v?