Where was it?  I came back to New York to look for it, and after a blue luncheon with the members of our committee, I came away with my mind made up—­I would sacrifice my Sylvia to this desperate emergency.

I knew just what I had to do.  So far she had heard speeches about social wrongs, or read books about them; she had never been face to face with the reality of them.  Now I persuaded her to take a morning off, and see some of the sights of the underworld of toil.  We foreswore the royal car, and likewise the royal furs and velvets; she garbed herself in plain appearing dark blue and went down town in the Subway like common mortals, visiting paper-box factories and flower factories, tenement homes where whole families sat pasting toys and gimcracks for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, and still could not buy enough food to make full-sized men and women of them.

She was Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—­faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb.  Several times we stopped to talk with these people—­one little Jewess girl I knew whose three tiny sisters had been roasted alive in a sweatshop fire.  This child had jumped from a fourth-story window, and been miraculously caught by a fireman.  She said that some man had started the fire, and been caught, but the police had let him get away.  So I had to explain to Sylvia that curious bye-product (sic) of the profit system known as the “Arson Trust.”  Authorities estimated that incendiarism was responsible for the destruction of a quarter of a billion dollars worth of property in America every year.  So, of course, the business of starting fires was a paying one, and the “fire-bug,” like the “cadet” and the dive-keeper, was a part of the “system.”  So it was quite a possible thing that the man who had burned up this little girl’s three sisters might have been allowed to escape.

I happened to say this in the little girl’s hearing, and I saw her pitiful strained eyes fixed upon Sylvia.  Perhaps this lovely, soft-voiced lady was a fairy god-mother, come to free her sisters from an evil spell and to punish the wicked criminal!  I saw Sylvia turn her head away, and search for her handkerchief; as we groped our way down the dark stairs, she caught my hand, whispering:  “Oh, my God! my God!”

It had even more effect than I had intended; not only did she say that she would do something—­anything that would be of use—­but she told me as we rode back home that her mind was made up to stop the squandering of her husband’s money.  He had been planning a costume ball for a couple of months later, an event which would keep the van Tuiver name in condition, and would mean that he and other people would spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  As we rode home in the roaring Subway, Sylvia sat beside me, erect and tense, saying that if the ball were given, it would be without the presence of the hostess.