Difficult as is the position of the girl out of work when her family is

exigent and uncomprehending, she has incomparably more protection than
the girl who is living in the city without home ties
Difficult as is the position of the girl out of work when her family is
exigent and uncomprehending, she has incomparably more protection than
the girl who is living in the city without home ties. Such girls form
sixteen per cent. of the working women of Chicago. With absolutely every
penny of their meagre wages consumed in their inadequate living, they
are totally unable to save money. That loneliness and detachment which
the city tends to breed in its inhabitants is easily intensified in such
a girl into isolation and a desolating feeling of belonging nowhere. All
youth resents the sense of the enormity of the universe in relation to
the insignificance of the individual life, and youth, with that intense
self-consciousness which makes each young person the very centre of all
emotional experience, broods over this as no older person can possibly
do. At such moments a black oppression, the instinctive fear of
solitude, will send a lonely girl restlessly to walk the streets even
when she is 'too tired to stand,' and when her desire for companionship
in itself constitutes a grave danger. Such a girl living in a rented
room is usually without any place in which to properly receive callers.
An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses
in which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. were found with
a parlor in which guests might be received. Many girls quite innocently
permit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifully
disguised as 'sitting-rooms,' but the danger is obvious, and the
standards of the girl gradually become lowered.