After all, those people down there in Calvary Alley were her people, and
she meant to stand by them. It had been the dream of her life to get out
and away, but in that moment she knew that wherever she went, she would
always come back. Others might help from the top, but she could help
understandingly from the bottom. With the magnificent egotism of youth,
she outlined gigantic schemes on the curtain of the night. Some day,
somehow, she would make people like the Clarkes see the life of the poor
as it really was, she would speak for the girls in the factories, in the
sweatshops, on the stage. She would be an interpreter between the rich
and the poor and make them serve each other.
"Nance!" called an injured voice from the music room behind her, "what in
the mischief are you doing out there in the cold? Come on in here and
amuse me. I'm half dead with the dumps!"
"All right, Mr. Mac. I'm coming," she said cheerfully, as she stepped in
through the French window and closed it against her night of dreams.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE NEW FOREMAN
The Dan Lewis who came back to Clarke's Bottle Factory was a very
different man from the one who had walked out of it five years before. He
had gone out a stern, unforgiving, young ascetic, accepting no
compromise, demanding perfection of himself and of his fellow-men. The
very sublimity of his dream doomed it to failure. Out of the crumbling
ideals of his boyhood he had struggled to a foothold on life that had
never been his in the old days.
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