The continued spread of the strike and of sympathy with it had already reached large proportions. The losses to business and to business men and the inconvenience to even the well-to-do classes were immense and when calculated in figures were quite staggering. The winter had set in with sudden severity. The suffering among the poor was incalculable. There was not a house or shop in the poorer districts where the pinch of poverty was not beginning to be felt. The wolf, which ever stands beside the door of the poor, had long since entered and cleaned out many of the small dwellings which the summer before had been the abode of hope and of reasonable content. Only the human wolves who prey on misfortune battened and fattened; the stock-brokers who organized raids on "the market," the usurers who robbed the poor more directly, but not more effectively, the thieves of one kind or another alone prospered. The cry of hunger increased while bitterness without and within had long since begun to be universal, so long as to be scarcely heeded throughout the poor quarters. The efforts of philanthropy, individual and organized, were exercised to the utmost, but the trouble was too vast to be more than touched on the outer fringe. The evil which Mr. Leigh had predicted had come to pass and his prophecy had been far more than verified. Many of the young women, turned from their factories, had disappeared from the places which knew them before and found their way to haunts like Mel Gallagin's "Gallery" and others less splendid, but not more wicked. Only in the sphere in which persons of extraordinary accumulation moved, like the Canters and the Argands, was there apparently no diminution in their expenditure and display. Young Canter and his comrades still flaunted their vast wealth in undisguised and irresponsible display--still gambled on the stock boards in commodities that touched the lives of pining thousands--still multiplied their horses and automobiles, and drove them recklessly through crowded streets, heedless of the pinched and scowling faces of unemployed multitudes. But older and saner heads were beginning to shake when the future was mentioned. The reefing of sails for a storm whose forerunners were on the horizon was already taking place, and every reef meant that some part of the crew which had sailed the ship so far was dropped overboard.