the twenty thousand dollars of insurance money to the Relief and
Prevention Work; he visited the injured and the bereaved; he forgot Myra
and tried to forget himself; he attended committee meetings.

Myra wrote him a little note:

DEAR JOE,--Don't forget that whatever happens I
believe in you utterly and I love you and shall always
love you, and that you have me when all else is lost.

Your
MYRA.

To which he merely replied:

DEAR MYRA,--I shall remember what you say, and I
shall see you when I can.

Yours,
JOE.

It was on Sunday afternoon that Joe met Fannie Lemick on the street. Her
eyes filled with tears and he noticed she was trembling.

"Mr. Joe!" she cried.

"Yes, Fannie...."

"Are you going, too?"

"Going where?"

"Don't you know? _The mass-meeting at Carnegie Hall_!"

He looked at her, smiling.

"I'll go with you, if I may!"

So they went down together. A jam of poor people was crowding the
doors, and a string of automobiles drew up and passed at the curb. Joe
and Fannie got in the throng. There was no room left in the orchestra
and they were swept with the flood up and up, flight after flight, to
the high gallery. Here they found seats and looked down, down as if on
the side of the planet, on the far-away stage filled with the speakers
and the committees, and on that sea of humanity that swept back and up
through the boxes to themselves. All in the subdued light, the golden
light that crowd sat, silent, remorseful, stirred by a sense of having
risen to a great occasion; thousands of human beings, the middle class,
the rich, the poor; Americans, Germans, Italians, Jews. But all about
him Joe felt a silent hatred, a still cry for vengeance, a class
bitterness. Many of these were relatives of the dead.

It was a demonstration of the human power that refuses to submit to
environment and circumstance and fate; that rises and rebukes facts,
reshapes destiny. And then the speaking began: the bishop, the rabbi,
the financier, the philanthropist, the social worker. They spoke
eloquently, they showed pity, they were constructive, they were prepared
to act; they represented the "better classes" and promised the "poor,"
the toilers, that they would see that relief and protection were given;
but somehow their eloquence did not carry; somehow that mass of
commonest men and women refused to be stirred and thrilled. There was
even a little hissing when it was announced that a committee