Two days later, as quietly as her life had ended, Etta’s body, with her baby on its breast, was put into the ground, and mingled with David Guard’s voice as he read the service for the dead was the far-off murmur of city noises, the soft rise and fall of city sounds.  With Mrs. Mundy and Mrs. Banch, the old shoemaker and his wife, I stood at the open grave and watched the earth piled into a mound that marked a resting-place at last for a broken body and a soul no one had tried to reach that it might save, but I did not hear the beating of the clods of clay, nor the twittering of the birds in the trees, nor the wind in their tops.  I heard instead Etta’s cry to Kitty and to me:  “In God’s name, can’t somebody do something to make good women understand!”

It is these words that beat into my brain at night; these and the words I did not speak in time and which, on the next day, were too late.  The note she sent Selwyn also keeps me awake.

“I am going,” she wrote, “so the thought of me will not make you afraid.  You tried to help me, but there isn’t any help for girls like me.  I am taking the baby with me.  I want to be sure she will be safe.  It would be too hard for her, the fight she’d have to make.  I can’t leave her here alone.  Etta.”

Last night David Guard came in for a few minutes.  Leaning back in a big chair, he half closed his eyes and in silence watched the flames of the fire, and, seeing he was far away in thought, I went on with the writing of the letter I had put aside when he came in.  I always know when he is tired and worn, and I have learned to say nothing, to be as silent as he when I see that the day’s work has so wearied him he does not wish to talk.  At other times we talk much—­talk of life and its possibilities, of old cults and new philosophies, of books and places; of the endless struggles of men like himself to be intellectually honest and spiritually free.  But oftenest we speak of the people around us, the people on whom the injustices of a selfish social system fall most heavily; and among them, sharing their hardships, understanding their burdens, recognizing their limitations and weaknesses, leading and directing them, he has found life in losing it, and it now has meaning for him that is bigger and finer than the best that earth can give.

Presently he stirred, drew a long breath as one awaking, but when he spoke he did not turn toward me.

“I saw Mr. Thorne the night before he left with Harrie for his friend’s ranch in Arizona.  He is going to give him another chance, and it’s pretty big of him to do it, but I doubt if anything will come of it.  Harrie belongs to a type of humanity beyond awakening to a realization of moral degeneracy; a type that believes so confidently in the divine right of class privilege that it believes little else.  Harrie’s failure to appreciate the hideousness of certain recent experiences has made them all the more keenly felt by his brother.  I have rarely seen a man suffer as the latter has suffered in the past few days, but unless I am mistaken—­”