“Come here!” he said, fiercely, clutching her hand.  “Women as fair and pure as you have come into dens like this,—­and never gone away.  Does it make your delicate breath faint?  And you a follower of the meek and lowly Jesus!  Look here! and here!”

The room was swarming with human life.  Women, idle trampers, whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep or smoking on the floor, and set up a chorus of whining begging when they entered.  Half-naked children crawled about in rags.  On the damp, mildewed walls there was hung a picture of the Benicia Boy, and close by Pio Nono, crook in hand, with the usual inscription, “Feed my sheep.”  The Doctor looked at it.

“’Tu es Petrus, et super hanc’—­Good God! what is truth?” he muttered, bitterly.

He dragged her closer to the women, through the darkness and foul smell.

“Look in their faces,” he whispered.  “There is not one of them that is not a living lie.  Can they help it?  Think of the centuries of serfdom and superstition through which their blood has crawled.  Come closer,—­here.”

In the corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks.  Going on the underground railroad to Canada.  Stolid, sensual wretches, with here and there a broad, melancholy brow and desperate jaws.  One little pickaninny rubbed its sleepy eyes and laughed at them.

“So much flesh and blood out of the market, unweighed!”

Margaret took up the child, kissing its brown face.  Knowles looked at her.

“Would you touch her?  I forgot you were born down South.  Put it down, and come on.”

They went out of the door.  Margaret stopped, looking back.

“Did I call it a bit of hell?  It’s only a glimpse of the under-life of America,—­God help us!—­where all men are born free and equal.”

The air in the passage grew fouler.  She leaned back faint and shuddering.  He did not heed her.  The passion of the man, the terrible pity for these people, came out of his soul now, whitening his face and dulling his eyes.

“And you,” he said, savagely, “you sit by the road-side, with help in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life lost, quarrel with your God, because that mass of selfishness has left you,—­because you are balked in your puny hope!  Look at these women.  What is their loss, do you think?  Go back, will you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost dream, and go to Shakspeare for tragedy when you want it?  Tragedy!  Come here,—­let me hear what you call this.”

He led her through the passage, up a narrow flight of stairs.  An old woman in a flaring cap sat at the top, nodding,—­wakening now and then, to rock herself to and fro, and give the shrill Irish keen.

“You know that stoker who was killed in the mill a month ago?  Of course not,—­what are such people to you?  There was a girl who loved him,-you know what that is?  She’s dead now, here.  She drank herself to death,—­a most unpicturesque suicide.  I want you to look at her.  You need not blush for her life of shame, now; she’s dead.—­Is Hetty here?”