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<h3>“ONE AMONG SO MANY.”</h3> . . .  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, p. 52Your 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! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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