She heard the noise of street brawls at night, voices of men and women quarreling in alley-ways, and up in wretched garrets; flinging up at each other, in horrible words, all the evil they knew of in each other’s lives,—­“away back,” Luclarion said, “to when they were little children.”

“And what is it,” she would say to Mrs. Ripwinkley telling her about it, “that flings it up, and can call it a shame, after all the shames of years and years?  Except just that that the little children were, underneath, when the Lord let them—­He knows why—­be born so?  I tell you, ma’am, it’s a mystery; and the nigher you come to it, the more it is; it’s a piece of hell and a piece of heaven; it’s the wrastle of the angel and the dragon; and it’s going on at one end, while they’re building up their palaces and living soft and sweet and clean at the other, with everything hushed up that can’t at least seem right and nice and proper.  I know there’s good folks there, in the palaces; beautiful folks; there, and all the way down between; with God’s love in them, and His hate, that is holy, against sin; and His pity, that is prayers in them, for all people and places that are dark; but if they would come down there, and take hold!  I think it’s them that would, that might have part in the first resurrection, and live and reign the thousand years.”

Luclarion never counted herself among them,—­those who were to have thrones and judgments; she forgot, even, that she had gone down and taken hold; her words came burning-true, out of her soul; and in the heat of truth they were eloquent.

But I meant to tell you of her living.

In the daytime it was quiet; the gross evils crept away and hid from the sunshine; there was labor to take up the hours, for those who did labor; and you might not know or guess, to go down those avenues, that anything worse gathered there than the dust of the world’s traffic that the lumbering drays ground up continually with their wheels, and the wind,—­that came into the city from far away country places of green sweetness, and over hills and ponds and streams and woods,—­flung into the little children’s faces.

Luclarion had taken a house,—­one of two, that fronted upon a little planked court; aside, somewhat, from Neighbor Street, as that was a slight remove from the absolute terrible contact of Arctic Street.  But it was in the heart of that miserable quarter; she could reach out her hands and touch and gather in, if it would let her, the wretchedness.  She had chosen a place where it was possible for her to make a nook of refuge, not for herself only, or so much, as for those to whom she would fain be neighbor, and help to a better living.