One of our earliest experiences at Hull-House had to do with a lover of this type and the charming young girl who had become fatally attached to him.  I can see her now running for protection up the broad steps of the columned piazza then surrounding Hull-House.  Her slender figure was trembling with fright, her tear-covered face swollen and bloodstained from the blows he had dealt her.  “He is apt to abuse me when he is drunk,” was the only explanation, and that given by way of apology, which could be extracted from her.  When we discovered that there had been no marriage ceremony, that there were no living children, that she had twice narrowly escaped losing her life, it seemed a simple matter to insist that the relation should be broken off.  She apathetically remained at Hull-House for a few weeks, but when her strength had somewhat returned, when her lover began to recover from his prolonged debauch of whiskey and opium, she insisted upon going home every day to prepare his meals and to see that the little tenement was clean and comfortable because “Pierre is always so sick and weak after one of those long ones.”  This of course meant that she was drifting back to him, and when she was at last restrained by that moral compulsion, by that overwhelming of another’s will which is always so ruthlessly exerted by those who are conscious that virtue is struggling with vice, her mind gave way and she became utterly distraught.

A poor little Ophelia, I met her one night wandering in the hall half dressed in the tawdry pink gown “that Pierre liked best of all” and groping on the blank wall to find the door which might permit her to escape to her lover.  In a few days it was obvious that hospital restraint was necessary, but when she finally recovered we were obliged to admit that there is no civic authority which can control the acts of a girl of eighteen.  From the hospital she followed her heart directly back to Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of the Hull-House neighborhood.  We knew later that he had degraded the poor child still further by obliging her to earn money for his drugs by that last method resorted to by a degenerate man to whom a woman’s devotion still clings.

It is inevitable that a force which is enduring enough to withstand the discouragements, the suffering and privation of daily living, strenuous enough to overcome and rectify the impulses which make for greed and self-indulgence, should be able, even under untoward conditions, to lift up and transfigure those who are really within its grasp and set them in marked contrast to those who are merely playing a game with it or using it for gain.  But what has happened to these wretched girls?  Why has this beneficent current cast them upon the shores of death and destruction when it should have carried them into the safe port of domesticity?  Through whose fault has this basic emotion served merely to trick and deride them?

Older nations have taken a well defined line of action in regard to it.