She dropped her dish as she heard Lily coming, and gazed up into the
tender, pitying face. Not a word was spoken, but something she saw
there made her eyes fill with tears, and her throat swell. It was pure
sympathy. She put her arms around the girl's neck and sobbed for the
first time since Friday night. Then they sat down on the grass under
the hedge and she told her story, interspersed with Lily's horrified
comments.

When it was all told the girl still sat listening. She heard
Radbourn's calm, slow voice again. It helped her not to hate Burns; it
helped her to pity and understand him.

"You must remember that such toil brutalizes a man; it makes him
callous, selfish, unfeeling necessarily. A fine nature must either
adapt itself to its hard surroundings or die. Men who toil terribly in
filthy garments day after day and year after year cannot easily keep
gentle; the frost and grime, the heat and cold will sooner or later
enter into their souls. The case is not all in favor of the suffering
wives, and against the brutal husbands. If the farmer's wife is dulled
and crazed by her routine, the farmer himself is degraded and
brutalized. They are both products of a social system, victims of a
land system, which produces tenement houses in the city, and pushes
the farmer into a semi-solitude--victims of land laws that are relics
of feudalism, made in the interest of the man who holds a special
privilege in the earth. Free America has set up on its soil the
systems of land-owning which produces the lord and the tenant; that
glorifies speculation in the earth, and gives the priceless riches of
the hills and forests into a few hands. But this will not continue--it
can't continue. The awakening understanding of America cries out
against it."

As well as she could Lily explained all this to the woman who lay with
her face buried in the girl's lap. Lily's arms were about her thin
shoulders in an agony of pity.

"It's hard, Lucretia, I know, more than you can bear, but you mustn't
forget what Sim endures, too. He goes out in the storms and in the
heat and dust. His boots are hard, and see how his hands are all
bruised and broken by his work! He was tired and hungry when he said
that--he didn't really mean it."

The wife remained silent.

"Mr. Radbourn says work as things go now _does_ degrade a man in spite
of himself. He says men get coarse and violent in spite of themselves
just as women do when everything goes wrong