"This waste can be saved. I do not mean the men now in prison, nor the women in the street, nor those on whom ill conditions have fastened disease—though even they need not be wholly lost. I mean their successors, the growing children. If the production of citizens were a business run for profit—which in a sense it is, for each good citizen is worth thousands of dollars to the country—and were placed in the hands of a modern business man, then you would see! Had he been packer, steel manufacturer, goldsmith, not a bristle, not an ounce of steel, not the infinitesimal filings of gold, escaped him. Do you think that he would let millions of human beings, worth, to put a sordid money value upon their heads, ten thousand dollars apiece, be wasted? Never! He would find the great business leak and stop it. He would save all.
"And how save? I am a believer in heredity, yes; but I believe far more in the influence of surroundings. Let a child be cradled in the gutter and nursed by wickedness; let wickedness be its bedfellow, playfellow, workfellow, its teacher, its friend—and what do you get? The prisons tell you. Let the same child grow up surrounded by decency, and you have a decent child and later a decent man. Could the thousands and thousands of children who are developing towards criminality, towards profligacy, towards a stunted maturity, be set amid good conditions, the leak would be stopped, or almost—the great human waste would be brought to an end. They would be saved to themselves, and saved to their country.
"Nothing of all this is new to you, Miss Chambers. I have said so much because I wanted to make clear what has become my great dream—the great dream of so many. I should like to do my little part towards rousing the negligent, indifferent world to the awfulness of this waste—towards making it as economical of its people as it is of its pigs and its pig-iron. That is my dream."
He had begun quietly, but as his thought mastered him his face had flushed, his eyes had glowed, and he had stood up and his words had come out with all the passion of his soul. Helen's eyes had not for an instant shifted from his; her's too were aglow, and glow was in her cheeks.
For several moments after he had stopped she gazed at him with something that was very like awe; then she said, barely above a whisper: "You are going to do it!"
"No, no," David returned quickly, bitterly. "I have merely builded out of words the shape of an impossible dream. Look at what I dream; and then look at me, a janitor!—look at my record!"
"You are going to do it!" she repeated, her voice vibrant with belief. "The dream is not impossible. You are doing something towards its fulfilment now—the boy, you know. You are going to grow above your record, and above this position—far above! You are going to grow into great things. What you have been saying has been to me a prophecy of that."
He grew warmer and warmer under her words—under the gaze of her brown eyes glowing into his—under the disclosure made by her left hand, on which he had seen there was no engagement ring. Her praise, her sympathy, her belief, thrilled him; and his purpose, set free in words, had given him courage, had lifted him up. As from a swift, dizzy growth, he felt strong, big.
A burning impulse swept into him to tell her his innocence. For a moment his innocence trembled on his lips. But the old compelling reasons for silence rushed forward and joined battle with the desire of his love. His hands clenched, his body tightened, he stared at her tensely.
At length he drew a deep breath, swallowed with difficulty. "May the prophecy come true!" his dry lips said.