I wandered on into factory districts, long silent streets of grim black walls. Had men but escaped out of the prisons of the Old World into the more horrid prisons of the New? Dread took hold of me as on a dark street I was approached by a man who put a gun to my face. He wanted money and I tried to be facetious with him, telling him I hadn’t enough money to buy drinks for the two of us but would match him pennies for what I had but he only growled at me and taking my few pieces of silver hurried away. Perhaps he did not even understand my words. America, once a place that prided itself on its sense of humor, was now, since the coming of the factories, a place where the very robbers were all too serious about life. Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had come to live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as he could get no other work he had taken a place as street-car conductor. Oh, it was but a temporary arrangement. He was one who intended, as for that matter I did myself, to rise in the world. The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in one of the two rooms of her apartment or went for short walks in the park. We began presently to smile shyly at each other but did not speak, both being embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind of bond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with my book in my hand while she sat by her window also holding a book.