Sylvias Marriage | Page 6

items such as these and were thrilled by the triumphs
of their fellow-countrymen.
At Claire's house I learned to be interested in "society" news. From a
weekly paper of gossip about the rich and great she would read
paragraphs, explaining subtle allusions and laying bare veiled scandals.
Some of the men she knew well, referring to them for my benefit as
Bertie and Reggie and Vivie and Algie. She also knew not a little about
the women of that super-world--information sometimes of an intimate
nature, which these ladies would have been startled to hear was going
the rounds.
This insight I got into Claire's world I found useful, needless to say, in
my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism. I would go
from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit tenement-dens where
little children made paper-flowers twelve and fourteen hours a day for a
trifle over one cent an hour. I would spend the afternoon floating about
in the park in the automobile of one of her expensive friends, and then
take the subway and visit one of the settlements, to hear a discussion of
conditions which doomed a certain number of working-girls to be
burned alive every year in factory fires.
As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the
speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention. During
the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even towards the
lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room. While she was
being presented at St. James's, I was studying the glass-factories in
South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten working in front of
glowing furnaces until they dropped of exhaustion and sometimes had
their eyes burned out. While she and her husband were guests of the
German Emperor, I was playing the part of a Polish working-woman,
penetrating the carefully guarded secrets of the sugar-trust's domain in
Brooklyn, where human lives are snuffed out almost every day in

noxious fumes.
And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over. She
came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the de luxe steamers;
and the next morning I saw a new picture of her, and read a few words
her husband had condescended to say to a fellow traveller about the
courtesy of Europe to visiting Americans. Then for a couple of months
I heard no more of them. I was busy with my child-labour work, and I
doubt if a thought of Sylvia crossed my mind, until that
never-to-be-forgotten afternoon at Mrs. Allison's when she came up to
me and took my hand in hers.
6. Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had
begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at the
settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories;
whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear
me talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home.
I don't remember much of what I said, but if I may take the evidence of
Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told them,
for one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo was of that
indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father
without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey. His
people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the
glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work along the
railroad-track. It is a peculiarity of the glass-factory that it has to eat its
children both by day and by night; and after working six hours before
midnight and six more after midnight, little Angelo was tired. He had
no eye for the birds and flowers on a beautiful spring morning, but as
he was walking home, he dropped in his tracks and fell asleep. The
driver of the first morning train on that branch-line saw what he took to
be an old coat lying on the track ahead, and did not stop to investigate.
All this had been narrated to me by the child's mother, who had worked
as a packer of "beers," and who had loved little Angelo. As I repeated
her broken words about the little mangled body, I saw some of my
auditors wipe away a surreptitious tear.
After I had stopped, several women came up to talk with me at the last,
when most of the company was departing, there came one more, who
had waited her turn. The first thing I saw was her loveliness, the thing
about her that dazzled and stunned people, and then came the strange

sense of familiarity. Where had I