Leaving the class to take care of Swift, Edith went to the managers’ meeting at the Women’s Hospital, where there was much to do of very practical work, pitiful cases of women and children suffering through no fault of their own, and money more difficult to raise than sympathy.  The meeting took time and thought.  Dismissing her carriage, and relying on elevated and surface cars, Edith then took a turn on the East Side, in company with a dispensary physician whose daily duty called her into the worst parts of the town.  She had a habit of these tours before her marriage, and, though they were discouragingly small in direct results, she gained a knowledge of city life that was of immense service in her general charity work.  Jack had suggested the danger of these excursions, but she had told him that a woman was less liable to insult in the East Side than in Fifth Avenue, especially at twilight, not because the East Side was a nice quarter of the city, but because it was accustomed to see women who minded their own business go about unattended, and the prowlers had not the habit of going there.  She could even relate cases of chivalrous protection of “ladies” in some of the worst streets.

What Edith saw this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation, incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and helpfulness of the poor for each other.  Perhaps that which made the deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much enjoyment of life in situations that would have been simple misery to her.

The visitors were in a foreign city.  The shop signs were in foreign tongues; in some streets all Hebrew.  On chance news-stands were displayed newspapers in Russian, Bohemian, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, German-none in English.  The theatre bills were in Hebrew or other unreadable type.  The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise—­vegetables that had seen a better day, fish in shoals.  It was not easy to make one’s way through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were strictly intent on their own affairs.  No part of the town is more crowded or more industrious.  If youth is the hope of the country, the sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house steps, at all the windows.  The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on.  In the damp basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers.  In one noisome cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a