"If any one had told me," she said to herself, "when I was rich, that I
lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow-creatures, that my virtue and
ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation and toil and pain, I
should not have believed it, and I should have been angry. If I had
been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote with,
the ink I used, the paper I wrote on--all these, and everything I
touched, from my soap to my match-box, especially my match-box, was the
result of sweated labor, I should not have believed it, I should have
laughed. But yet it is so. If I had not been rich once myself I should
think as all these people do, that the rich are devils incarnate to let
such things go on. They have the power to help us. We have none to help
ourselves. But they never use it. The rich grind the poor for their
luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily
bread with our eyes open. I have got that woman's work. I have struggled
hard enough to get it, but, though I did not realize it, I might have
known that I had only got on to the raft by pushing some one else off
it."

Rachel looked out across the miles of roofs which lay below her garret
window. The sound was in her ears of that great whirlpool wherein youth
and beauty and innocence go down quick day by day. The wilderness of
leaden roofs turned suddenly before her eyes into a sullen furrowed sea
of shame and crime which, awaiting no future day of judgment, daily gave
up its awful dead.

Presently Hester came in, panting a little after the long ascent of worn
stairs, and dragging with her a large parcel. It was a fur-lined cloak.
Hester spread it mutely before her friend, and looked beseechingly at
her. Then she kissed her, and the two girls clung together for a moment