She had gone
away amazingly ignorant; what little she had known of life she had
learned away at school. But even there she had not realized the
possibility of wickedness and vice in the world. One of the girls
had run away with a music master who was married, and her name was
forbidden to be mentioned. That was wickedness, like blasphemy,
and a crime against the Holy Ghost.
She had never heard of prostitution. Near the camp there was a
district with a bad name, and the girls of her organization were
forbidden to so much as walk in that direction. It took her a long
time to understand, and she suffered horribly when she did. There
were depths of wickedness, then, and of abasement like that in the
world. It was a bad world, a cruel, sordid world. She did not want
to live in it.
She had had to reorganize all her ideas of life after that. At
first she was flamingly indignant. God had made His world clean and
beautiful, and covered it with flowers and trees that grew, cleanly
begotten, from the earth. Why had He not stopped there? Why had He
soiled it with passion and lust?
It was a little Red Cross nurse who helped her, finally.
"Very well," she said.
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