Then the chairman announced that Mrs. Burgoyne, “whom I’m sure we all know, although she isn’t one of us yet (laughter), has asked permission to address the club at the conclusion of the regular program.”  There was a little applause, and Sidney, very rosy, walked rapidly forward, to stand just below the platform.  She was nervous, obviously, and spoke hurriedly and in a rather unnatural voice.

“Your chairman and president,” she began, with a little inclination toward each, “have given me permission to speak to you today for five minutes, because I want to ask the Santa Paloma Women’s Club a favor—­a great favor, in fact.  I won’t say how much I hope the club will decide to grant it, but just tell you what it is.  It has to do with the factory girls across the river.  I’ve become interested in some of them; partly I suppose because some friends of mine are working for just such girls, only under infinitely harder circumstances, in some of the eastern cities, I feel, we all feel, I know, that the atmosphere of Old Paloma is a dangerous one for girls.  Every year certain ones among them ‘go wrong,’ as the expression is; and when a girl once does that, she is apt to go very wrong indeed before she stops.  She doesn’t care what she does, in fact, and her own people only make it harder, practically drive her away.  Or even if she marries decently, and tries to live down all the past it comes up between her and her neighbors, between her and her children, perhaps, and embitters her whole life.  And so finally she goes to join that terrible army of women that we others try to pretend we never see or hear of at all.  These girls work hard all day, and their homes aren’t the right sort of homes, with hot dirty rooms,—­full of quarreling and crowding; and so they slip out at night and meet their friends in the dancehalls, and the moving-picture shows.  And we—­we can’t blame them.”  Her voice had grown less diffident, and rang with sudden longing and appeal.  “They want only what we all wanted a few years ago,” she said.  “They want good times, lights and music, and pretty gowns, something to look forward to in the long, hot afternoons—­dances, theatricals, harmless meetings of all sorts.  If we could give them safe clean fun—­not patronizingly, and not too obviously instructive—­they’d be willing to wait for it; they’d talk about it instead of more dangerous things; they’d give up dangerous things for it.  They are very nice girls, some of them, and their friends are very nice fellows, for the most part, and they are—­they are so very young.

“However, about the club—­I am wondering if it could be borrowed for a temporary meeting-place for them, if we form a sort of club among them.  I say temporary, because I hope we will build them a clubhouse of their own some day.  But meantime there is only the Grand Opera House, which all the traveling theatrical companies rent; Hansen’s Hall, which is over a saloon, so that won’t do; and the Concert Hall, which costs twenty-five dollars a night.  We would, of course, see that the club was cleaned after every meeting, and pay for the lights.  I—­I think that’s about all,” finished Sidney, feeling that she had put her case rather ineloquently, and coming to a full stop.  She sat down, her eyes nowhere, her cheeks very red.