University of Virginia Library

34. CHAPTER XXXIV.
GOING TO THE BAD.

IT was the week before Christmas, and all New York
was stirring and rustling with a note of preparation.
Every shop and store was being garnished and furbished
to look its best. Christmas-trees for sale lay at the doors
of groceries; wreaths of ground-pine, and sprigs and
branches of holly, were on sale, and selling briskly.
Garlands and anchors and crosses of green began to
adorn the windows of houses, and were a merchantable
article in the stores. The toy-shops were flaming and
flaunting with a delirious variety of attractions, and
mammas and papas with puzzled faces were crowding
and jostling each other, and turning anxiously from side
to side in the suffocating throng that crowded to the
counters, while the shopmen were too flustered to answer
questions, and so busy that it seemed a miracle
when anybody got any attention. The country-folk
were pouring into New York to do Christmas shopping,
and every imaginable kind of shop had in its window
some label or advertisement or suggestion of something
that might answer for a Christmas gift. Even the grim,
heavy hardware trade blossomed out into festal suggestions.
Tempting rows of knives and scissors glittered
in the windows; little chests of tools for little masters,
with cards and labels to call the attention of papa to the
usefulness of the present. The confectioners' windows
were a glittering mass of sugar frostwork of every fanciful
device, gay boxes of bonbons, marvelous fabrications of

chocolate, and sugar rainbows in candy of every possible
device; and bewildered crowds of well-dressed purchasers
came and saw and bought faster than the two hands
of the shopmen could tie up and present the parcels.
The grocery stores hung out every possible suggestion
of festal cheer. Long strings of turkeys and chickens,
green bunches of celery, red masses of cranberries,
boxes of raisins and drums of figs, artistically arranged,
and garnished with Christmas greens, addressed themselves
eloquently to the appetite, and suggested that the
season of festivity was at hand.

The weather was stinging cold—cold enough to nip
one's toes and fingers, as one pressed round, doing
Christmas shopping, and to give cheeks and nose alike
a tinge of red. But nobody seemed to mind the cold.
“Cold as Christmas” has become a cheery proverb; and
for prosperous, well-living people, with cellars full of
coal, with bright fires and roaring furnaces and well-tended
ranges, a cold Christmas is merely one of the
luxuries. Cold is the condiment of the season; the
stinging, smarting sensation is an appetizing reminder of
how warm and prosperous and comfortable are all within
doors.

But did any one ever walk the streets of New York,
the week before Christmas, and try to imagine himself
moving in all this crowd of gaiety, outcast, forsaken and
penniless? How dismal a thing is a crowd in which you
look in vain for one face that you know! how depressing
the sense that all this hilarity and abundance and
plenty is not for you! Shakespeare has said, “How
miserable it is to look into happiness through another
man's eyes—to see that which you might enjoy and may
not, to move in a world of gaiety and prosperity where
there is nothing for you!”

Such were Maggie's thoughts, the day she went out

from the kindly roof that had sheltered her, and cast
herself once more upon the world. Poor hot-hearted,
imprudent child, why did she run from her only friends?
Well, to answer that question, we must think a little. It
is a sad truth, that when people have taken a certain
number of steps in wrong-doing, even the good that is in
them seems to turn against them and become their
enemy. It was in fact a residuum of honor and generosity,
united with wounded pride, that drove Maggie
into the street, that morning. She had overheard the
conversation between Aunt Maria and Eva; and certain
parts of it brought back to her mind the severe reproaches
which had fallen upon her from her Uncle
Mike. He had told her she was a disgrace to any honest
house, and she had overheard Aunt Maria telling the
same thing to Eva,—that the having and keeping such
as she in her home was a disreputable, disgraceful thing,
and one that would expose her to very unpleasant comments
and observations. Then she listened to Aunt
Maria's argument, to show Eva that she had better send
her mother away and take another woman in her place,
because she was encumbered with such a daughter.

“Well,” she said to herself, “I'll go then. I'm in
everybody's way, and I get everybody into trouble that's
good to me. I'll just take myself off. So there!” and
Maggie put on her things and plunged into the street
and walked very fast in a tumult of feeling.

She had a few dollars in her purse that her mother
had given her to buy winter clothing; enough, she
thought vaguely, to get her a few days' lodging somewhere,
and she would find something honest to do.

Maggie knew there were places where she would be
welcomed with an evil welcome, where she would have
praise and flattery instead of chiding and rebuke; but
she did not intend to go to them just yet.

The gentle words that Eva had spoken to her, the
hope and confidence she had expressed that she might
yet retrieve her future, were a secret cord that held her
back from going to the utterly bad.

The idea that somebody thought well of her, that
somebody believed in her, and that a lady pretty, graceful,
and admired in the world, seemed really to care to
have her do well, was a redeeming thought. She would
go and get some place, and do something for herself,
and when she had shown that she could do something,
she would once more make herself known to her friends.
Maggie had a good gift at millinery, and, at certain odd
times, had worked in a little shop on Sixteenth Street,
where the mistress had thought well of her, and made
her advantageous offers. Thither she went first, and
asked to see Miss Pinhurst. The moment, however,
that she found herself in that lady's presence, she was
sorry she had come. Evidently, her story had preceded
her. Miss Pinhurst had heard all the particulars of her
ill conduct, and was ready to the best of her ability to
act the part of the flaming sword that turned every way
to keep the fallen Eve out of paradise.

“I am astonished, Maggie, that you should even
think of such a thing as getting a place here, after all's
come and gone that you know of; I am astonished that
you could for one moment think of it. None but young
ladies of good character can be received into our work-rooms.
If I should let such as you come in, my respectable
girls would feel insulted. I don't know but they
would leave in a body. I think I should leave, under
the same circumstances. No, I wish you well, Maggie,
and hope that you may be brought to repentance; but,
as to the shop, it isn't to be thought of.”

Now, Miss Pinhurst was not a hard-hearted woman;
not, in any sense, a cruel woman; she was only on that

picket duty by which the respectable and well-behaved
part of society keeps off the ill-behaving. Society has
its instincts of self-protection and self-preservation, and
seems to order the separation of the sheep and the goats,
even before the time of final judgment. For, as a general
thing, it would not be safe and proper to admit
fallen women back into the ranks of those unfallen,
without some certificate of purgation. Somebody must
be responsible for them, that they will not return again
to bad ways, and draw with them the innocent and inexperienced.
Miss Pinhurst was right in requiring an
unblemished record of moral character among her shop-girls.
It was her mission to run a shop and run it well;
it was not her call to conduct a Magdalen Asylum:
hence, though we pity poor Maggie, coming out into the
cold with the bitter tears of rejection freezing her cheek,
we can hardly blame Miss Pinhurst. She had on her
hands already all that she could manage.

Besides, how could she know that Maggie was really
repentant? Such creatures were so artful; and, for
aught she knew, she might be coming for nothing else
than to lure away some of her girls, and get them into
mischief. She spoke the honest truth, when she said she
wished well to Maggie. She did wish her well. She
would have been sincerely glad to know that she had
gotten into better ways, but she did not feel that it was
her business to undertake her case. She had neither
time nor skill for the delicate and difficult business of
reformation. Her helpers must come to her ready-made,
in good order, and able to keep step and time: she
could not be expected to make them over.

“How hard they all make it to do right!” thought
Maggie. But she was too proud to plead or entreat.
“They all act as if I had the plague, and should give it
to them; and yet I don't want to be bad. I'd a great

deal rather be good if they'd let me, but I don't see any
way. Nobody will have me, or let me stay,” and Maggie
felt a sobbing pity for herself. Why should she be
treated as if she were the very off-scouring of the earth,
when the man who had led her into all this sin and sorrow
was moving in the best society, caressed, admired,
flattered, married to a good, pious, lovely woman, and
carrying all the honors of life?

Why was it such a sin for her, and no sin for him?
Why could he repent and be forgiven, and why must
she never be forgiven? There was n't any justice in it,
Maggie hotly said to herself—and there was n't; and
then, as she walked those cold streets, pictures without
words were rising in her mind, of days when everybody
flattered and praised her, and he most of all. There is
no possession which brings such gratifying homage as
personal beauty; for it is homage more exclusively belonging
to the individual self than any other. The
tribute rendered to wealth, or talent, or genius, is far less
personal. A child or woman gifted with beauty has a
constant talisman that turns all things to gold—though,
alas! the gold too often turns out like fairy gifts; it is
gold only in seeming, and becomes dirt and slate-stone
on their hands.

Beauty is a dazzling and dizzying gift. It dazzles
first its possessor and inclines him to foolish action; and
it dazzles outsiders, and makes them say and do foolish
things.

From the time that Maggie was a little chit, running
in the street, people had stopped her, to admire her hair
and eyes, and talk all kinds of nonsense to her, for the
purpose of making her sparkle and flush and dimple,
just as one plays with a stick in the sparkling of a
brook. Her father, an idle, willful, careless creature,
made a show plaything of her, and spent his earnings for

her gratification and adornment. The mother was only
too proud and fond; and it was no wonder that when
Maggie grew up to girlhood her head was a giddy one,
that she was self-willed, self-confident, obstinate. Maggie
loved ease and luxury. Who doesn't? If she had
been born on Fifth Avenue, of one of the magnates of
New York, it would have been all right, of course, for
her to love ribbons and laces and flowers and fine
clothes, to be imperious and self-willed, and to set her
pretty foot on the neck of the world. Many a young
American princess, gifted with youth and beauty and with
an indulgent papa and mamma, is no wiser than Maggie
was; but nobody thinks the worse of her. People laugh
at her little saucy airs and graces, and predict that she
will come all right by and by. But then, for her, beauty
means an advantageous marriage, a home of luxury and
a continuance through life of the petting and indulgence
which every one loves, whether wisely or not.

But Maggie was the daughter of a poor working-woman—an
Irishwoman at that—and what marriage leading
to wealth and luxury was in store for her?

To tell the truth, at seventeen, when her father died
and her mother was left penniless, Maggie was as unfit
to encounter the world as you, Miss Mary, or you, Miss
Alice, and she was a girl of precisely the same flesh and
blood as yourself. Maggie cordially hated everything
hard, unpleasant or disagreeable, just as you do. She
was as unused to crosses and self-denials as you are.
She longed for fine things and pretty things, for fine
sight-seeing and lively times, just as you do, and felt just
as you do that it was hard fate to be deprived of them.
But, when worse came to worst, she went to work with
Mrs. Maria Wouvermans. Maggie was parlor-girl and
waitress, and a good one too. She was ingenious, neat-handed,
quick and bright; and her beauty drew favorable

attention. But Mrs. Wouvermans never commended,
but only found fault. If Maggie carefully dusted every
one of the five hundred knick-knacks of the drawingroom
five hundred times, there was nothing said; but if,
on the five hundred and first time, a moulding or a crevice
was found with dust in it, Mrs. Wouvermans would
summon Maggie to her presence with the air of a judge,
point out the criminal fact, and inveigh, in terms of general
severity, against her carelessness, as if carelessness
were the rule rather than the exception.

Mrs. Wouvermans took special umbrage at Maggie's
dress—her hat, her feathers, her flowers—not because
they were ugly, but because they were pretty, a great
deal too pretty and dressy for her station. Mrs. Wouvermans's
ideal of a maid was a trim creature, content
with two gowns of coarse stuff and a bonnet devoid of
adornment; a creature who, having eyes, saw not anything
in the way of ornament or luxury; whose whole
soul was absorbed in work, for work's sake; content with
mean lodgings, mean furniture, poor food, and scanty
clothing; and devoting her whole powers of body and
soul to securing to others elegancies, comforts and luxuries
to which she never aspired. This self-denied sister
of charity, who stood as the ideal servant, Mrs. Wouvermans's
maid did not in the least resemble. Quite another
thing was the gay, dressy young lady who, on Sunday
mornings, stepped forth from the back gate of her
house with so much the air of a Murray Hill demoiselle
that people sometimes said to Mrs. Wouvermans, “Who
is that pretty young lady that you have staying with
you?”—a question that never failed to arouse a smothered
sense of indignation in that lady's mind, and added
bitterness to her reproofs and sarcasms, when she found
a picture-frame undusted, or pounced opportunely on a
cobweb in some neglected corner.

Maggie felt certain that Mrs. Wouvermans was on the
watch to find fault with her—that she wanted to condemn
her, for she had gone to service with the best of
resolutions. Her mother was poor and she meant to
help her; she meant to be a good girl, and, in her own
mind, she thought she was a very good girl to do so
much work, and remember so many different things in so
many different places, and forget so few things.

Maggie praised herself to herself, just as you do, my
young lady, when you have an energetic turn in household
matters, and arrange and beautify, and dust, and
adorn mamma's parlors, and then call on mamma and
papa and all the family to witness and applaud your
notability. At sixteen or seventeen, household virtue is
much helped in its development by praise. Praise is sunshine;
it warms, it inspires, it promotes growth: blame and
rebuke are rain and hail; they beat down and bedraggle,
even though they may at times be necessary. There
was a time in Maggie's life when a kind, judicious,
thoughtful, Christian woman might have kept her from
falling, might have won her confidence, become her
guide and teacher, and piloted her through the dangerous
shoals and quicksands which beset a bright, attractive,
handsome young girl, left to make her own way
alone and unprotected.

But it was not given to Aunt Maria to see this opportunity;
and, under her system of management, it was not
long before Maggie's temper grew fractious, and she used
to such purpose the democratic liberty of free speech,
which is the birthright of American servants, that Mrs.
Wouvermans never forgave her.

Maggie told her, in fact, that she was a hard-hearted,
mean, selfish woman, who wanted to get all she could
out of her servants, and to give the least she could in
return; and this came a little too near the truth ever to

be forgotten or forgiven. Maggie was summarily warned
out of the house, and went home to her mother, who
took her part with all her heart and soul, and declared
that Maggie shouldn't live out any longer—she should
be nobody's servant.

This, to be sure, was silly enough in Mary, since service
is the law of society, and we are all more or less
servants to somebody; but uneducated people never
philosophize or generalize, and so cannot help themselves
to wise conclusions.

All Mary knew was that Maggie had been scolded
and chafed by Mrs. Wouvermans; her handsome darling
had been abused, and she should get into some higher
place in the world; and so she put her as workwoman
into the fashionable store of S. S. & Co.

There Maggie was seen and coveted by the man who
made her his prey. Maggie was seventeen, pretty, silly,
hating work and trouble, longing for pleasure, leisure,
ease and luxury; and he promised them all. He told
her that she was too pretty to work, that if she would
trust herself to him she need have no more care; and
Maggie looked forward to a rich marriage and a home
of her own. To do her justice, she loved the man that
promised this with all the warmth of her Irish heart.
To her, he was the splendid prince in the fairy tale,
come to take her from poverty and set her among
princes; and she felt she could not do too much for him.
She would be such a good wife, she would be so devoted,
she would improve herself and learn so that she might
never discredit him.

Alas! in just such an enchanted garden of love, and
hope, and joy, how often has the ground caved in and
let the victim down into dungeons of despair that never
open!

Maggie thinks all this over as she pursues her cheer

[ILLUSTRATION]

GOING TO THE BAD.
"The sweet-faced woman calls the attention of her husband. He
frowns, whips up the horse, and is gone. . . Bitterness possisses
Maggie's soul. . . Why not go to the bad?"—p. 327.

[Description: 710EAF. Illustration page. Image of a woman walking and watching a carriage drive by with a man, woman, and child in it. It is windy and the womans skirts are blowing against her legs, her arms are crossed as if to warm herself. The people in the carriage are bundled in warm clothes.]

less, aimless way through the cold cutting wind, and
looks into face after face that has no pity for her.
Scarcely knowing why she did it, she took a car and
rode up to the Park, got out, and wandered drearily up
and down among the leafless paths from which all trace
of summer greenness had passed.

Suddenly, a carriage whirred past her. She looked
up. There he sat, driving, and by his side so sweet a
lady, and between them a flaxen-haired little beauty,
clasping a doll in her chubby arms!

The sweet-faced woman looks pitifully at the haggard,
weary face, and says something to call the attention
of her husband. An angry flush rises to his face. He
frowns, and whips up the horse, and is gone. A sort of
rage and bitterness possess Maggie's soul. What is the
use of trying to do better? Nobody pities her. Nobody
helps her. The world is all against her. Why not go
to the bad?