And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over.  She came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the de luxe steamers; and the next morning I saw a new picture of her, and read a few words her husband had condescended to say to a fellow traveller about the courtesy of Europe to visiting Americans.  Then for a couple of months I heard no more of them.  I was busy with my child-labour work, and I doubt if a thought of Sylvia crossed my mind, until that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon at Mrs. Allison’s when she came up to me and took my hand in hers.

6.  Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had begun to feel uncomfortable in mind.  I had happened to meet her at the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories; whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home.

I don’t remember much of what I said, but if I may take the evidence of Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively.  I told them, for one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri.  Little Angelo was of that indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey.  His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work along the railroad-track.  It is a peculiarity of the glass-factory that it has to eat its children both by day and by night; and after working six hours before midnight and six more after midnight, little Angelo was tired.  He had no eye for the birds and flowers on a beautiful spring morning, but as he was walking home, he dropped in his tracks and fell asleep.  The driver of the first morning train on that branch-line saw what he took to be an old coat lying on the track ahead, and did not stop to investigate.

All this had been narrated to me by the child’s mother, who had worked as a packer of “beers,” and who had loved little Angelo.  As I repeated her broken words about the little mangled body, I saw some of my auditors wipe away a surreptitious tear.

After I had stopped, several women came up to talk with me at the last, when most of the company was departing, there came one more, who had waited her turn.  The first thing I saw was her loveliness, the thing about her that dazzled and stunned people, and then came the strange sense of familiarity.  Where had I met this girl before?

She said what everybody always says; she had been so much interested, she had never dreamed that such conditions existed in the world.  I, applying the acid test, responded, “So many people have said that to me that I have begun to believe it.”

“It is so in my case,” she replied, quickly.  “You see, I have lived all my life in the South, and we have no such conditions there.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.