The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.

None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over it.

When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt disguised her. Attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen.

There came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity said: "Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker." About this period her brother remarked to her: "Mag, I'll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh've edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!" Whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell.

This is a description of Maggie, the title character of Stephen Crane's novel. She's foxy.

Maggie isn't like the other kids in the slums. She somehow grows up to be pretty (despite the fact that she's probably not eating well and not being looked after very well either). But her prettiness also suggests that she has a different nature—it's as if not only is she better looking than the environment in which she grew up, but she's somehow gentler, too.

Hmm. Stephen Crane obviously hasn't watched Mean Girls half a dozen times and come to understand that prettiness and gentleness don't always go hand in hand.

It's significant that the narrator is signaling to us that Maggie is somehow different because that, again, points to one of the big Naturalist themes: people are the product of their heredity. Maggie, clearly, has inherited looks that don't fit in with the world she's grown up in.

Stephen Crane does some pretty wacky stuff with dialogue in this excerpt. Maggie's brother, and the boys of the neighborhood, talk in a pretty strong dialect. And Stephen Crane doesn't try to "clean up" this dialect for his readers. He just presents it as it is.

Crane's depiction of dialogue reflects the Naturalists'  approach toward their subject matter. Naturalists like to present things as they are, or they like to show us life as it really is. Here, Crane wants us to hear how boys in the slums really speak. He is also showing us (again, without any sugarcoating) how a life of grinding poverty and 19th century filth tend to erode good looks.