“I want to see you a minute, Mr. Blaine.”

The voice was shaking with passion.

“Sit down,” said Joe, and the man took the seat beside him.

“I’m Mr. Lissner—­Albert Lissner—­I was the owner of the Lissner Shirtwaist Company.”

Joe looked at him.

“Lissner?  Oh yes, over on Eighth Street.”

The man went on: 

“Mr. Blaine, I had eighty girls working for me....  I always did all I could for them ... but there was fierce competition, and I was just skimping along, and I had to pay small wages;... but I was good to those girls....  They didn’t want to strike ... the others made them....”

Joe was stirred.

“Yes, I know ... many of the shops were good....”

“Well,” said Lissner, with a shaking, bitter smile, “you and your strike have ruined me....  I’m a ruined man....  My family and I have lost everything....  And, it’s killed my wife.”

His face became terrible—­very white, and the eyes staring—­he went on in a hollow, low voice: 

“I—­I’ve lost all.”

There was a silence; then Lissner spoke queerly: 

“I happen to know about you, Mr. Blaine....  You were the head of that printing-place that burnt down....”

Joe felt a shock go through him, as if he had seen a ghost....

“Well, maybe you did all you could for your men;... maybe you were a good employer....  Yet see what came of it....”  Suddenly Lissner’s voice rose passionately:  “And yet you had the nerve to come around and get after us fellows, who were just as good as you.  There are bad employers, and bad employees, too—­bad people of every kind—­but maybe most people are good.  You couldn’t help what happened to you; neither can we help it if the struggle is too fierce—­we’re victims, too.  It’s conditions, it’s life.  We can’t change the world in a day.  And yet you—­after your fire—­come here and ruin us.”

Joe was shaken to his depths.  Lissner had made an overstatement, and yet he had thrown a new light on the strike, and he had reminded Joe of his long-forgotten guilt.  And suddenly Joe knew.  All are guilty; all share in the corruption of the world—­the laborer anxious for mass-tyranny and distrustful of genius, the aristocrat afraid of soiling his hands, the capitalist intent on power and wealth, the artist neglectful of all but a narrow artifice, each one limited by excess or want, by intellect or passion, by vanity or lust, and all struggling with one another to wrest some special gift for himself.  In the intricacy of civilization there are no real divisions, but every man is merely a brain cell, a nerve, in the great organism, and what one man gains, some other must lose.  It was a world he got a glimpse of quite different from that sharp twofold world of the workers and the money-power, a world of infinite gradations, a world merely the child of the past, where high and low were pushed by the resistless pressure of environment, and lives were shaped by birth, chance, training, position, and a myriad, myriad indefinable forces.