"You can begin to see the outlines of the problems before us. It
will be years before you can realise the height and depth of need
that calls here to-day for deeds more heroic than knights of old
ever dreamed."

Again she looked at him with frank admiration.

"But the most wonderful thing I have seen to-day has been a man,"
she boldly said. "Your faith, your optimism, your dreams in the face
of the awful facts of life, and with it a tenderness of sympathy
I never thought in you, have been a revelation to me. I feel more
and more ashamed of the years I have wasted."

She said this very tenderly, while Gordon unconsciously tightened
the grip of his big hand on her arm, and then went on as though
she had not spoken.

"What a call to an earnest life! New York City furnishes two-thirds
of the convicts of the state. We have one murder and ten suicides
every week. More than eighty thousand men and women are arrested
here every year. Fifty thousand pass through that basilisk's den we
saw to-day. We have a hundred thousand child workers out of whose
tender flesh we are coining gold. Three hundred thousand of our
women are hewers of wood and drawers of water, robbed of their divine
right of love and motherhood. There are twenty thousand children
and fifty thousand men and women homeless in our streets. I have
seen more than five hundred of them fighting for the chance of
sleeping on the bare planks of a dirty police lodging-house."

He felt her nerves quiver with sympathy and surprise.