a little about the women of that super-world--information sometimes
of an intimate nature, which these ladies would have been startled
to hear was going the rounds.

This insight I got into Claire's world I found useful, needless to
say, in my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism. I
would go from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit
tenement-dens where little children made paper-flowers twelve and
fourteen hours a day for a trifle over one cent an hour. I would
spend the afternoon floating about in the park in the automobile of
one of her expensive friends, and then take the subway and visit one
of the settlements, to hear a discussion of conditions which doomed
a certain number of working-girls to be burned alive every year in
factory fires.

As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the
speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention.
During the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even
towards the lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room.
While she was being presented at St. James's, I was studying the
glass-factories in South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten
working in front of glowing furnaces until they dropped of
exhaustion and sometimes had their eyes burned out. While she and
her husband were guests of the German Emperor, I was playing the
part of a Polish working-woman, penetrating the carefully guarded
secrets of the sugar-trust's domain in Brooklyn, where human lives
are snuffed out almost every day in noxious fumes.

And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over. She
came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the _de luxe_