Then there is the After-Care Committee. Miss Chen, social worker, read a paper on the work covered by this department, showing how discharged convalescents are followed up to see that they get a fair start again. In 16 months 1,460 cases of poverty and homelessness have been dealt with, Miss Chen's most interesting story was that of a 13%-year-old girl who was brought into the Lester Hospital in pitiable plight by a woman whom the staff suspected of owning her as a slave. No word could be coaxed from the terrified youngster while she sojourned under this charitable roof, where her baby was born dead.
When she left they watched her go with melancholy foreboding, feeling that for once their repeated kindnesses had drawn a blank.
But when the slave girl returned to the household of the Chinese master who had raped her, and who still considered her his chattel, his partiality for her roused the jealousy of his lawful wife, who filled the unfortunate girl up with samshu one freezing night, and turned her, out into the streets to die.
Drunk as she was (that fiery spirit probably saved her life), the poor little slave managed to recall, and repeat, as she swayed along the dark roads, the name of the one place where she had been treated with tenderness and pity. And so the Lester Hospital received her back, and placed her with the Door of Hope, after setting machinery to work which gave her mistress due punishment and her master 18 months' imprisonment.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.