repetitious.

Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as they
are--the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth? Is it
our disregard of the artist's message which makes us so blind and so
stupid, or are we so under the influence of our _Zeitgeist_ that we
can detect only commercial values in the young as well as in the old?
It is as if our eyes were holden to the mystic beauty, the redemptive
joy, the civic pride which these multitudes of young people might
supply to our dingy towns.

The young creatures themselves piteously look all about them in order
to find an adequate means of expression for their most precious
message: One day a serious young man came to Hull-House with his
pretty young sister who, he explained, wanted to go somewhere every
single evening, "although she could only give the flimsy excuse that
the flat was too little and too stuffy to stay in." In the difficult
rôle of elder brother, he had done his best, stating that he had taken
her "to all the missions in the neighborhood, that she had had a
chance to listen to some awful good sermons and to some elegant hymns,
but that some way she did not seem to care for the society of the best
Christian people." The little sister reddened painfully under this
cruel indictment and could offer no word of excuse, but a curious
thing happened to me. Perhaps it was the phrase "the best Christian
people," perhaps it was the delicate color of her flushing cheeks and
her swimming eyes, but certain it is, that instantly and vividly there
appeared to my mind the delicately tinted piece of wall in a Roman
catacomb where the early Christians, through a dozen devices of spring
flowers, skipping lambs and a shepherd tenderly guiding the young, had
indelibly written down that the Christian message is one of