And he was amazed to see how he had changed and grown.  He looked back on the man who had gone down to West Tenth Street as on a callow and ignorant youth, enthusiastic, but crude and untried.  Back through those past months he went with the search-light of introspection, and then at last he knew.  He had gone down to Greenwich Village crammed with theories; he had set to work as if he were a sheltered scientist in a quiet laboratory, where an experiment could be carried through, and there suddenly he had been confronted with Facts!  Facts! those queer unbudgable things!  Facts in a fierce stampede that engulfed and swept him along and put all his dreams to a galloping test, a test wherein he had even forgotten his dreams.

He had gone the way of all reformers, first the explosive arousal, then the theory, then the test.

He went over the Greenwich Village experience with Myra: 

“Why,” he laughed, “I expected to do great things.  Whereas, look, I have done nothing.  This strike ends in a little bettering, and a few people read my paper.  It’s just a little stir, hardly a dent—­a few atoms set into motion.  How slow! how slow! Patience!  That’s the word I’ve learned!  It will take worlds of time; it will take a multitude striving; it will take unnumbered forces—­education, health-work, eugenics, town-planning, the rise of women, philanthropy, law—­a thousand thousand dawning powers.  Oh, we are only at the faint beginnings of things!”

And he thought of the books he had read, and the theories of which he had been so sure.

“But,” he exclaimed, “was my diagnosis correct?  Did I really know the human muddle?  Has any man really mapped out civilization?  It’s so huge, complex, varied—­so many disorganized forces—­who can classify it—­label it?  It’s bigger than our thought about it.  We lay hands on only a few wisps of it!  Life!  Life itself—­not our interpretation—­is the great outworking force!”

And then again.

“We see certain tendencies and believe they will advance unhindered, but there may be other tendencies to counteract, change, even defeat these.  No future can be predicted!  And yet I was so sure of the future—­so sure of what we are to build—­that future which we keep modifying so persistently the moment it hits To-day.”

In short, he had reached his social manhood—­which meant to him, not dogma, but the willingness to arise every morning ready to reshape his course, prepared for any adventure, receptive, open-minded, and all willing to render his very life for what seemed good to do.  Scientific reverence this, the willingness to experiment, to try, to test, and then, if the test failed, to grope for a new line of outlet, the readiness to reverse all he believed in in the face of a new and contradictory fact.  He was a new Joe Blaine.

And so the spirit that sprang from those dead girls became a creative power, a patient, living strength.