One Among So Many.

. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me,      Importuning, one wet and mild March night.      We walked and talked together. O her tale      Was very common; thousands know it all!      Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming;      Parents that railed; London; the child born dead;      A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls      "Taken on" a few months at a dressmaker's      In the crush of the "season;" thirteen shillings a week!      The fashionable people's dresses done,      And they flown off, these fifty extra girls      Sent - to the streets: that is, to work that gives      Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes      Respectable employers all demand      Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!      And she - "Why, I have gone on down and down,      And there's the gutter, look, that I shall die in!"      "My dear," I say, "where hope of all but that      Is gone, 'tis time, I think, life were gone too."      She looks at me. "That I should kill myself?" -      "That you should kill yourself." - "That would be sin,      And God would punish me!" - "And will not God      Punish for this?" She pauses: then whispers:      "No, no, He will forgive me, for He knows!"      I laughed aloud: "And you," she said, "and you,      Who are so good, so noble" . . . "Noble? Good?"      I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat.      O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep      Of this vast flock that perishes alone      Out in the pitiless desert! - Yet she'd speak:      She'd ask me: she'd entreat: she'd demonstrate.      O I must not say that! I must believe!      Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the sky      So big and blue and pure above it all?      O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep,      Entreat no more and demonstrate no more;      For I believe there is a God, a God      Not in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no,      But in the heart of man, on the dear lips      Of angel women, of heroic men!      O hopeless wanderer that would not stay,      ("It is too late, I cannot rise again!")      O saint of faith in love behind the veils,      ("You must believe in God, for you are good!"),      O sister who made holy with your kiss,      Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of March      There in the hideous infamous London streets      My cheek, and made my soul a sacred place,      O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep!