It was at this time that Gladys, whose whole literature consisted of the more pictorial of the daily papers, wrote some badly spelled and very pathetic little letters, asking advice as to whether a girl of her age, who had been keeping steady company with a young man of her lover’s age, whom she dearly loved, should make advances if he seemed to exhibit a preference for another girl, and she inquired pitifully of the editor, as of some deity, as to whether she thought her lover did really prefer the other girl to her.  These letters, and the answers, were a source of immense comfort to Gladys.  Sometimes, when she met Maria, they made her feel almost on terms of equality with her.  She doubted if Maria, smart as she was, had ever really appeared in the papers.  She wrote her letters under different names, and even sent them from neighboring towns, and walked long distances, when she felt that she wanted to save car-fare, to post them.  Once Maria met her as she was walking along with an evening paper in her hand, reading the reply to one of her letters, and Maria wondered at the expression on Gladys’s face.  She at once pitied, feared, and detested Gladys.  She doubted if she were a good girl; she herself, like a nun without even dreams, seemed living in another sphere, she felt so far removed.  She was in reality removed, although Gladys, if the truth were told, was not so bad, and she got some good advice from the answers in response to her letters, which restrained her.  Still, her view of everything was different.  She was different.  Black was not as black to her as to Maria; a spade was not so truly a spade.  She recognized immorality as a fact, but it did not seem to her of so much importance.  In one sense she was more innocent even than Maria, for she had never felt the true living clutch of vice on her soul, even in imagination; she could not.  The devil to her was not of enough consequence to enable her to sin in the truest sense of the word.  All her family were immoral, and a constant living in an atmosphere of immorality may, in one sense, make one incapable of spiritual sin.  One needs to fully sense a sin in order to actually commit it.  Gladys could hardly sense sin as Maria could.  Still she had a sense of proud virtue after reading the paragraphs of good advice in reply to her letters to the paper, and she felt that it placed her nearer Maria’s level.  On the occasion when Maria met her reading the paper, she even spoke.

“Hullo, M’ria!” said she.

“Good-evening,” Maria replied, politely and haughtily.

But Gladys did not seem to notice the haughtiness.  She pressed close to Maria.

“Say!” said she.

“What?” asked Maria.

“Ain’t you ever goin’ to—?”

“No, I am not,” replied Maria, deadly pale, and trembling from head to foot.

“Why don’t you write to this paper and ask what you had better do?” said Gladys.  “It’s an awful good plan.  You do git awful good advice.”