"Each morning as I took my place in the shop I had the feeling of my boyhood--as if I were celebrating a High Mass before the sacrifice of another day. There was much of the Pontifical in me, for I was a rapt radical. Each morning on my way to Commercial Calvary I saw another sacrifice; I overtook small shrivelled forms, children they were, by the dim dawn. How their immature coughings racked my heart and gave me that strange tightening of the chest! I could not keep my eyes from the ground whence came the sound of small telltale splashes, after each cough. Many times I stopped to hold a child who was vomiting. "Here was a woe too deep for tears; and I must look with dry eyes or I should fail to see. Have you ever noticed the searching dry gaze of the poor? It is like the seeing, wistful look of a child--which few can bear without flinching. I had no need to read Dante's imaginary 'Inferno.' I was living in a real one which made all imagination seem trivial. 'The short and simple annals of the poor' seems like poetry, but only superficially, for it is not truth, but a fiction. It is false, for the annals of the aristocracy are not so long, neither are they so complex. "I am not trying to plead for anything. I am trying merely to express. Prepared for everything, I have forgiven everything, even myself. Everything that could happen has happened to me, perhaps the worst that happened did not come from without, but from within. My family came off safely enough from the fray of the factory. Only two of us were maimed for life and five claimed for death--out of a family of eleven. That left half a dozen for the statistician to figure on." Terry, a transcendental poet, who worked in the shop for many years, had quit it some time before he met Marie. The above letter shows, in a general way, the mood which finally brought about his social self-exile, so to speak. The letter which follows gives a specific instance of the kind of experience which disgusted the idealist with the imperfect world. He had been living against society, had foregathered with outcasts and had thrown down the gauntlet generally to organised society, for some years, but he still from time to time worked at some job or other. An incident happening some years after the meeting with Marie, which is still to be described, is sufficiently typical of what finally threw him entirely out from society to be truthfully illustrative at this point. "I was keeping open house for all comers, regardless of law or order, morality or money. I wished to hurl myself and my theories to the test, and gauntlet my defiance to a withered world. It was a happy time, looked back on now as a dream, in which, however, there was an undertone of nightmare. We had three little rooms up many mild flights of unbalustered stairs. Our main furniture consisted of mattresses which, like morning clouds, were rolled away when the sun arose.