future could have achieved them, only a capture of the imagination and
of the deepest emotions of youth could have prevented them!

Possibly these fifteen thousand youths were brought to grief because
the adult population assumed that the young would be able to grasp
only that which is presented in the form of sensation; as if they
believed that youth could thus early become absorbed in a hand to
mouth existence, and so entangled in materialism that there would be
no reaction against it. It is as though we were deaf to the appeal of
these young creatures, claiming their share of the joy of life,
flinging out into the dingy city their desires and aspirations after
unknown realities, their unutterable longings for companionship and
pleasure. Their very demand for excitement is a protest against the
dullness of life, to which we ourselves instinctively respond.




CHAPTER IV

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS


To the preoccupied adult who is prone to use the city street as a mere
passageway from one hurried duty to another, nothing is more touching
than his encounter with a group of children and young people who are
emerging from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon
them. They look up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing
it and quite unable to determine the direction of home. From a tangle
of "make believe" they gravely scrutinize the real world which they