injustice of his fate.
Labor, agony, war had taught him wisdom and vision. He began to
realize that no greater change could there be than this of his mind,
his soul. But in the darkness there an irresistible grief assailed
him. He wept as never before in all his life. And he tasted the bitter
salt of his own tears. He wept for his mother, aged and bowed by
trouble, bewildered, ready to give up the struggle--his little sister
now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong
path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power--the men he had
met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of
self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the
honor of women--Mel Iden, strangest and saddest of mysteries--a girl
who had been noble, aloof, proud, with a heart of golden fire, now
disgraced, ruined, the mother of a war-baby, and yet, strangest of
all, not vile, not bad, not lost, but groping like he was down those
vast and naked shores of life. He wept for the hard-faced Mrs. Wrapp,
whose ideal had been wealth and who had found prosperity bitter ashes
at her lips, yet who preserved in this modern maelstrom some sense of
its falseness, its baseness. He wept for Helen, playmate of the years
never to return, sweetheart of his youth, betrayer of his manhood, the
young woman of the present, blase, unsexed, seeking, provocative, all
perhaps, as she had said, that men had made her--a travesty on
splendid girlhood. He wept for her friends, embodying in them all of
their class--for little Bessy Bell, with her exquisite golden beauty,
her wonderful smile that was a light of joy--a child of fifteen with
character and mind, not yet sullied, not yet wholly victim to the
unstable spirit of the day.

And traveling in this army that seemed to march before Lane's eyes
were the slackers, like Mackay and Swann, representative of that horde
of cowards who in one way or another had avoided the service--the
young men who put comfort, ease, safety, pleasure before all else--who
had no ideal of womanhood--who could not have protected women--who
would not fight to save women from the apish Huns--who remained behind
to fall in the wreck of the war's degeneration, and to dance, to
drink, to smoke, to ride the women to their debasement.

And for the first and the last time Lane wept for himself, pitifully
as a child lost and helpless, as a strong man facing irreparable loss,
as a boy who had dreamed beautiful dr