hildren
looking as though they had never had anything to munch at--children
playing and children crying--it seemed the children's part of town. The
men and women of tomorrow were growing up in a part of the city too
loathsome for the civilized man and woman of today to set foot in. He was
too filled with thought of Ann--the horror of its being where she
lived--to let the bigger thought of it brush him more than fleetingly,
but it did occur to him that there was still a frontier--and that the men
who could bring about smokeless cities--and odorless ones--would be
greater public servants than the men who had achieved smokeless powder.
Riding through that part of town it would scarcely suggest itself to any
one that what the country needed was more battleships.

The children still waited as he rang an inhospitable doorbell, as
interested in life as if life had been treating them well.

He had to ring again before a woman came to the door with a cup in her
hand which she was wiping on a greasy towel.

She looked very much as the bell had sounded.

She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for
some of the army's boasted experts on sanitation. It was a place to make
one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell.

Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening
door a wave stole out from an unlovely life. Captain Wayneworth Jones,
U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better
protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from
lives of struggle.

"She the girl that's sick?" the woman demanded in response to his inquiry
for Miss Forrest.

He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third
floor and turn to the right. It was the second door.

He hesitated, coloring.

"Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here? I think perhaps she may
prefer to see me--down here."

The woman stared, then laughed. She looked like an evil woman as she
laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front
teeth gone.

"Well we ain't got no _parlor_ for the young ladies to see their
young men in," she said mockingly. "And if you climbed as many stairs
as I did--"

"I beg your pardon," said he, and started up the stairway.

On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle. The matter
would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were
housed in the ill-smelling place. Evidently Congress