Where
was the force that would stir them, make them forget their own
particular little grafts, and serve the public welfare in defiance
to hostile interests?
Where was it? I came back to New York to look for it, and after a
blue luncheon with the members of our committee, I came away with my
mind made up--I would sacrifice my Sylvia to this desperate
emergency.
I knew just what I had to do. So far she had heard speeches about
social wrongs, or read books about them; she had never been face to
face with the reality of them. Now I persuaded her to take a morning
off, and see some of the sights of the underworld of toil. We
foreswore the royal car, and likewise the royal furs and velvets;
she garbed herself in plain appearing dark blue and went down town
in the Subway like common mortals, visiting paper-box factories and
flower factories, tenement homes where whole families sat pasting
toys and gimcracks for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, and still
could not buy enough food to make full-sized men and women of them.
She was Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless
procession of tortured faces--faces of women, haggard and mournful,
faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102