No, the Coast for him, and the sooner the better, too!
The judge smiled tolerantly, observing,—
"I don't suppose they have much chance to bathe here. The city cannot afford to put up public baths and employers rarely think of those things."
"Look at the rotten stuff they eat!" The mason pointed disdainfully to the tipcarts drawn up along the curb, where men and women were chaffering over dried fish and forlorn vegetables that would have soured the soul of old Adams, who once raised celery on this very spot. "Don't the folks in these parts eat better than that?"
"Not generally," the judge replied. "We have no public market in this city, and it is very difficult for the poorer sort to get fresh food."
"You'd oughter see the California markets!" the young man bragged.
"Tell me about them," the judge said.
And while the young mason expatiated on his land of plenty where the poor man could still enjoy his own bit of God's sunlight and fresh fruit and flowers from the earth, Adelle watched the thick stream of workers in Clark's Field, pushing and dawdling along the narrow street. There were girls with bare arms and soiled shirt-waists and black skirts, there were lean, pale boys, and women old before their time, hurrying from tenement to shop, their hearts divided between the two cares of home and livelihood. Adelle recalled one of her first talks with the stone mason, in which he had crudely told her that her yearly income represented the total wages of four or five hundred able-bodied men and women, such as these, who worked from ten to sixteen hours a day for three hundred days each year, when they could, and all told earned hardly what she drew by signing her name to slips of paper as income from her property during the same space of time. He said to her,—"You can think that you are worth about four hundred human lives! Who talks about slavery being abolished? Hell!" She had thought then that his way of putting it was quite wrong, unjust: she was sure that Major Pound could easily have disposed of his contention. Indeed, she had heard the major and men like him maintain that capitalists like herself were the only true benefactors of humanity, that without them the working-people could never be fed! But to-day she was not sure that her cousin had been wrong. She saw a concrete proof of his statement in this stream of poorly nourished, hard-worked men, women, boys, and girls, all toiling to maintain themselves and pay her the interest upon the crowded land of Clark's Field. In a very definite sense they were all working for her; they were her slaves!
The younger women and girls looked into the judge's brougham curiously or impudently, attracted by the spectacle of leisure and quiet richness that Adelle presented, a sight not commonly afforded them in the streets of Clark's Field and always fascinating to women of any class wherever it may be. Adelle's dress was plain black, and she had shed much of her jewelry; but beneath her simple gown and fine linen and carefully cherished skin she began to feel a new sensation, not exactly pity for these less lucky sisters, rather wonder that it should all be so, that she should be sitting there in idleness and comfort and they should be tramping the pavement of Clark's Field to the factory....
When she saw the boys playing in the mud puddle in the one vacant lot, she thought of her own little boy, on whom she had lavished every care, every luxury. So with these working-girls, she thought how easily she might have been one of them going from the rooming-house in Church Street to shop or factory, as many women of better Puritan families than hers had done. It was pure accident, she could see, why she and her child had been saved from such a lot—due neither to her own ability nor that of any of her Clark forbears! It was a humbling perception.