And in consideration of the subject, Lane excluded all except the better class of Middleville.

It was no difficult task to understand lack of moral sense in children who were poor and unfortunate, who had to work, and get what pleasures they had in the streets.

But how about the best families, where there were luxurious homes, books, education, amusement, kindness, love--all the supposed stimuli needed for the proper guidance of changeful vagrant minds?
These good influences had failed.

There was a greater moral abandonment than would ever be known.
Before the war Bessy Bell would have presented the perfect type of the beautiful, highly sensitive, delicately organized girl so peculiarly and distinctively American.

She would have ripened before her time.
Perhaps she would not have been greatly different in feeling from the old-fashioned girl: only different in that she had restraint, no deceit.
But after the war--now--what was Bessy Bell?
What actuated her?
What was the secret spring of her abnormal tendencies?
Were they abnormal?
Bessy was wild to abandon herself to she knew not what.