I went to see her frequently at first, partly because I was interested in her and her associates, and partly because I really thought I could help her.  But I soon came to realize that influencing Claire was like moulding water; it flowed back round your hands, even while you worked.  I would argue with her about the physiological effects of alcohol, and when I had convinced her, she would promise caution; but soon I would discover that my arguments had gone over her head.  I was at this time feeling my way towards my work in the East.  I tried to interest her in such things as social reform, but realized that they had no meaning for her.  She was living the life of the pleasure-seeking idlers of the great metropolis, and every time I met her it seemed to me that her character and her appearance had deteriorated.

Meantime I picked up scraps of information concerning the van Tuivers.  There were occasional items in the papers, their yacht, the “Triton,” had reached the Azores; it had run into a tender in the harbour of Gibraltar; Mr. and Mrs. van Tuiver had received the honour of presentation at the Vatican; they were spending the season in London, and had been presented at court; they had been royal guests at the German army-manoeuvres.  The million wage-slaves of the metropolis, packed morning and night into the roaring subways and whirled to and from their tasks, read items such as these and were thrilled by the triumphs of their fellow-countrymen.

At Claire’s house I learned to be interested in “society” news.  From a weekly paper of gossip about the rich and great she would read paragraphs, explaining subtle allusions and laying bare veiled scandals.  Some of the men she knew well, referring to them for my benefit as Bertie and Reggie and Vivie and Algie.  She also knew not a little about the women of that super-world—­information sometimes of an intimate nature, which these ladies would have been startled to hear was going the rounds.

This insight I got into Claire’s world I found useful, needless to say, in my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism.  I would go from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit tenement-dens where little children made paper-flowers twelve and fourteen hours a day for a trifle over one cent an hour.  I would spend the afternoon floating about in the park in the automobile of one of her expensive friends, and then take the subway and visit one of the settlements, to hear a discussion of conditions which doomed a certain number of working-girls to be burned alive every year in factory fires.

As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention.  During the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even towards the lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room.  While she was being presented at St. James’s, I was studying the glass-factories in South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten working in front of glowing furnaces until they dropped of exhaustion and sometimes had their eyes burned out.  While she and her husband were guests of the German Emperor, I was playing the part of a Polish working-woman, penetrating the carefully guarded secrets of the sugar-trust’s domain in Brooklyn, where human lives are snuffed out almost every day in noxious fumes.