So Buck, obliging but mystified, dropped back upon the bed and proceeded, tooth-pick energetically at work.  His theme was a problem with which nearly every city is unhappily familiar.  In Buck’s terminology, it was identified as “The Centre Street mashers”:  those pimply, weak-faced, bad-eyed young men who congregate at prominent corners every afternoon, especially Saturdays, to smirk at the working-girls, and to pass, wherever they could, from their murmured, “Hello, Kiddo,” and “Where you goin’, baby?” to less innocent things.

Buck’s air of leisureliness dropped from him as he talked; his orange-stick worked ever more and more furiously; his honest voice grew passionate as he described conditions as he knew them.

“...  And some fool of a girl, no more than a child for knowing what she’s doin’, laughs and answers back—­just for the fun of it, not looking for harm, and right there’s where your trouble begins.  Maybe that night after doin’ the picture shows; maybe another night; but it’s sure to come.  Dammit, Doc, I’m no saint nor sam-singer and I’ve done things I hadn’t ought like other men, and woke up shamed the next morning, too, but I’ve got a sister who’s a decent good girl as there is anywhere, and by God, sir, I’d kill a man who just looked at her with the dirty eyes of them little soft-mouth blaggards!”

Queed, unaffectedly interested, asked the usual question—­could not the girls be taught at home the dangers of such acquaintances?—­and Buck pulverized it in the usual way.

“Who in blazes is goin’ to teach ’em?  Don’t you know anything about what kind of homes they got?  Why, man, they’re the sisters of the little blaggards!”

He painted a dark picture of the home-life of many of these girls:  its hard work and unrelenting poverty; its cheerlessness; the absence of any fun; the irresistible allurement of the flashily-dressed stranger who jingles money in his pocket and offers to “show a good time.”  Then he told a typical story, the story of a little girl he knew, who worked in a department store for three dollars and a half a week, and whose drunken father took over the last cent of that every Saturday night.  This girl’s name was Eva Bernheimer, and she was sixteen years old and “in trouble.”

“You know what, Doc?” Buck ended.  “You’d ought to take it up in the Post—­that’s what.  There’s a fine piece to be written, showin’ up them little hunters.”

It was characteristic of Doctor Queed that such an idea had not and would not have occurred to him:  applying his new science of editorial writing to a practical problem dipped from the stream of everyday life was still rather beyond him.  But it was also characteristic of him that, once the idea had been suggested to him, he instantly perceived its value.  He looked at Buck admiringly through the iron bars.

“You are quite right.  There is.”

“You know they are trying to get up a reformatory—­girls’ home, some call it.  That’s all right, if you can’t do better, but it don’t get to the bottom of it.  The right way with a thing like this is to take it before it happens!”