Emma Johnson turned on the gas and died. She left a letter, in which she said:
“Dearest Friends--When you have read this I have crossed the bar. Ambition, energy and strength have deserted me and every hope and dream is shattered. Death is the only relief. I have called upon heaven to save me from myself--to send me a natural death. I don’t want to die like this. I want to live and be happy, but that is not to be.
“I’ve had my hell here, but it is hard to go like this, hard to bring this sorrow upon my folks, bitterly hard.
“For the one who has driven me to do this I feel only love, and if I am permitted to enter heaven I shall wait for him.
“Perhaps he will love me then; he will feel bad about this, but help him understand that I forgive all, and I hope some one else will be to him what I never could, a joy and a comfort, and that she may make him happy as I had hoped to do. I wish I could look upon the faces of my dear father and brothers and sisters again. I can’t still the voice in my heart. I haven’t the strength. Forgive me and pray for me. Only another lost soul.”
Rose Lubin’s younger brother, Max, wanted help with his “home work” last night. Rose, who is 16, is proud of her standing at the head of the eighth grade in the Winfield school.
“I can’t do my own work and yours, too,” she told Max. “I’ve got enough to keep me busy till bed time and I’m not going to lose my marks on your account.”
Max went to his father and the father went to Rose.
“If you don’t help your brother I’ll take you out of school,” said Lubin.
Whereupon Rose changed her mind about the manner in which the nickel she had earned in the afternoon was to be spent. She bought acid with it, returned to her home at 951 West Fifteenth street, and drank the poison.
Rose will not be at school today. Perhaps she will never go back. She is in the county hospital. Physicians there fear she will not recover.
Mary Stober, eighteen years old, of 951 East 135th Street, who tried to kill herself last week (Friday) because she has no piano, is home again from the Lincoln Hospital, and is starting in to live again in a world where no hope is, since she cannot have a piano.
To dream every night that you have a piano and “play just grand,” and then wake up to hear the alarm clock buzzing six o’clock; to forget where you are, and half close your eyes and pretend that the movements your fingers are making are on a piano, instead of having something to do with the bobbin of a machine in an embroidery factory; to hear beautiful music suddenly in the midst of your work, and listen, startled and ecstatic, for a moment until it is lost in the endless whirring of the machines--these things, if you have never done them, may seem a certainty that Life is, after all, very splendid while there is such a thing as imagination, and that the gray of it is woven full of unexpected and vivid threads of color.