When I assured her that, beginning at one dollar a day, I had worked my way up to ninety dollars a month, I saw that the last amount sounded good to her. And I also saw that even as the salary offered by the government had not been large enough to get her to work for her country, ninety dollars was not sufficient to cause her to forget her “position” as a novelist. It was a case of debt rather than dishonor. Suddenly she discovered a reason to take a hurried departure. I felt no inclination to detain her. While working my way from a dollar a day to ninety the month I had learned “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” The chiefest of many reasons why tenement-dwellers appeared happily content during the war were: First, those who had sons, brothers, husbands, uncles, sweethearts, or cousins to the remotest degree in the service felt that they were doing their duty, a proud duty, to their country; second, workers were receiving a living wage, a vast majority living decently for the first time in their lives; third, they believed, they sincerely believed, that they were helping to “make the world safe for democracy.” They were convinced that the United States had entered the war, taken their sons across the Atlantic “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” They believed it as they believed in God, as they believed in their own existence. The older ones, those who had come to the country as immigrants, believed that America had actually become the wonderful Promised Land of their dreams. For hadn’t they lived to see their own sons march down Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with the sons of money kings? Didn’t their daughters, on coming home nights, tell of the daughter of yet another money king working in the same room, actually taking orders from her? They had lived to see the stigma taken off work. A human soul was a human soul, regardless of the “guinea’s stamp.” Once the war was won they believed that condition would continue—that the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful would continue to work shoulder to shoulder with their own. They believed that the downfall of German imperialism meant an end to human cootyism in the United States—a government of the people, by the people, for the people. How many times did I see the light that never was on sea or land shining in the eyes of a tenement mother as she told me of her son sleeping under the poppies in France.