“They sent me to take two aprons to a woman on Harrow Street. ‘It was quite safe,’ they said. So I went down through the dirty street into an inner court, and began to climb the stairs. It was perfectly dark; it was unutterably filthy.
“The woman, I found, lived in the garret, and, after the last flight of stairs, I had to climb a ladder to reach her. In the loft at the top of the ladder I saw,—I shall never forget it!—a woman diseased, shrunken, helpless. Half her face was withered and gone; she was cold, hungry, dirty. Two miserable little girls were crawling around her, crying.
“And I stood there stupefied, unable to speak, unable to grasp all the horror before me. I could do nothing for them. I only stared, helplessly, and petted the little girls. Then I gave that bed-ridden woman the two gingham aprons and came away.
“That scene made an impression upon me that I shall never lose. Since then, all the charity work I have heard of has seemed as ironic as that. Such misery is hopeless. Something deeper than human misdeeds must be the cause. I cannot help it; I cannot help believing that we are the sport of the gods, who sit behind the curtain and laugh at our hurt.”
In the pause that followed, Janet went to the window, forgetting to put down the empty cup that she had taken from me.
Suddenly she turned to me, with her chin raised in defiance.
“Moreover,” she said slowly, “I don’t want to forget my own life entirely in the lives of other people. I want it all, the pleasure and the pain of it, the whole cup down to the dregs.”
There was nothing for me to say; I rose to go.
“What do you think of the Lad?” I asked.
The girl’s face brightened. “He is interesting,” she said. “He is so different. It seems to me that he is the only one of us who is really living. The rest of us are merely talking about it.”