tter mud on my nice new velvet
skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who
commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think
that?"

"I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty
finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with
clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the
corner drug-store. Seriously--I remember a cook I used to talk to on
my way down to Panama once----"

("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")

"----and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."

"Yes, but generally do you find very much--oh, courtesy and that sort
of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the
better class'?"

"No, I don't."

"You don't? Why, I thought--the way you spoke----"

"Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to
climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious
as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump
ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought to
_take_ things. If I were a union man, I wouldn't trust all these
writers and college men and so on, that try to be sympathetic. Not for
one minute. They mean well, but they can't get what it means to a real
workman to have to be up at five every winter morning, with no heat in
the furnished housekeeping room; or to have to see his Woman sick
because he can't afford a doctor."

So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really
is like.

"I want to find out what we can do with life!" she said. "Surely it's
something more than working to get tired, and then resting to go back
to work. But I'm confused about things." She sighed. "My settlement
work--I went into it because I was bored. But it did make me realize
how many people are hungry. And yet we just talk and talk and
talk--Olive and I sit up half the night when she comes to my house,
and when we're not talking about the new negligees we're making and
the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we
rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do
any good to just talk?--Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right
down his middle."

"I don't know. But I do know I don't want to be just stupidly
satisfied, and talking does keep me from that, anyway. See here, Miss
Winslow, suppose some time I suggested that we become nice and earnest
and take up socialism and