Right away, Crane paints a picture of a poor environment full of violent children who stand "on a pile of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley ", (Crane, 1). The setting is described as being on the outskirts of any civilization, gruesome and chaotic. Maggie is clearly the victim of the terrible environment she finds herself in. Despite being the only flower in a pile of mud and dirt, still fails to fully blossom. Crane, in a sense, displays naturalism differently than other writers, since Maggie is not directly affected by her environment as her family and neighbors are when she found it Peter, she knew, she thought she knew, that he was her opportunity to escape from that environment. Being a hopeful girl, in such a limited environment, she saw Peter as her knight in shining armor. It's true, Peter was quite rich , but he wasn't the perfect man, the man of the highest standards that she thought he was. He failed to see that Peter possessed the wild, childish qualities of his brother and the other violent kids in the neighborhood. Being in such a class and having grown up the way she was, she didn't have the ability to truly see Peter and society as a whole. This, along with her terrible life, her family and her environment, was what led her to her horrible fate. Cane wrote Maggie's death very vaguely, as if her short life had no meaning to the universe. No one really cared about Maggie's death, showing how life goes on no matter what