Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious;
and I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted
flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the
starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of
commercial expansion and world empire. All about me were nobleness of
purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and
starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and
blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's own Grail, the warm human,
long-suffering and maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last.

And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere foretaste of the
delights of living I should find higher above me in society. I had lost
many illusions since the day I read "Seaside Library" novels on the
California ranch. I was destined to lose many of the illusions I still
retained.

As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals to me.
I entered right in on the parlour floor, and my disillusionment proceeded
rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of society, and with the
wives and daughters of the masters of society. The women were gowned
beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they
were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below
in the cellar. "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were sisters under
their skins"--and gowns.

It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me.
It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet
little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle
the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were
so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little
charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they
ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends
stained with the blood of child labour, and sweated labour, and of
prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts, expecting in my
innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady would at once strip off
their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited and angry, and
read me preachments about the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate
depravity that caused all the misery in society's cellar. When I
mentioned that I couldn't quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the
intemperance, and the depravit