He turned.

"Out? How long?"

"Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..."

He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside
the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down. His mother was
searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it.

And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys--as if those dead
girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies
through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million
homes, shaking New York into a realization of its careless, guilty
heart, crying for vengeance, stirring horror and anger and pity. Who was
the guilty one, if not he, the boss?

And then the inquisition began, the repeated sting of lashing thoughts
and cruel questions. He asked himself what right he had to be an
employer, to take the responsibility of thirty lives in his hands. He
was careless, easy-going, he was in business for profits. Had such a man
any right to be placed over others, to be given the power over other
lives? The guilt was his; the blame fell on him. He should have kept
clean house; he should have stamped out the smoking; he should not have
smoked himself. There fell upon his shoulders a burden not to be borne,
the burden of his blame, and he felt as if nothing now in the world
could assuage that sense of guilt.

Life, he found, was a fury, a cyclone, not the simple, easy affair he