Life here was gray and monotonous. Into it my young girl friends had rushed, with little knowledge of its actual conditions, but with a firm determination to change them for the better. This kind of poverty did not mean starvation, they said, but something worse: dearth of culture, of beauty, of ideas.
They were all political economists of the school of Ruskin.
The residents numbered ten. Some of them were girls fresh from college; others were women who bore marks of years of brain-work. At their head was a slender, dignified lady, who, after ten years of academic life, had resigned a college professorship in the classics for the sake of closer contact with humanity.
All phases of the activity in the house soon became familiar to me.
Sometimes I found the doors stormed by crowds of eager children, waiting the moment when the ladies should permit them to enter, that they might deposit pennies in the bank, or take books from the library.
Once I watched a Mothers’ Meeting conducted by a fair-haired girl of twenty-two.
I visited the boys’ clubs, and realized that the rough lads were learning courtesy, and much besides.
Certain evenings were purely social. Then we conversed, or listened to music, or read stories aloud. On these occasions I learned many useful things from the “neighbours,” about house-keeping, and the bringing up of children, and even about politics.
One shabby little woman, whose husband had marched away with an industrial delegation to present a petition to Congress, told me that a terrible revolution was coming in which the working-man would at last gain his rights by means of powder and shot.
It would be hard to tell all the ways in which these young collegians “drew nearer the People”: through medicines given out by the resident physician in the dispensary downstairs; through presentations of Mrs. Jarley’s wax-works, and of scenes from eighteenth century comedy; through the lending of cook-books and of treatises on philosophy.