“Did you know that there are in this city now seventy-one thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven totally dark rooms; some of them connected with an air-shaft twenty-eight inches wide and seventy feet deep; many of them absolutely without access to even a dark shaft; and that these rooms are the only place in the whole wide, beautiful world for thousands of little children, unless they stay in the street?” The sentence shot through the audience like a great deliberate bolt of lightning that crashed through the hearts of the hearers and tore away every vestige of their complacency. The people sat up and took notice. Starr thrilled and trembled, she knew not why. “There is a tenement with rooms like this, a ‘dumb-bell’ tenement, it is called, in the alley where, for aught I know, I was born—” “Oh!” The sound swept over the listeners in a great wave like a sob of protest. Men and women raised their opera glasses and looked at the speaker again. They asked one another: “Who is he?” and settled quiet to hear what more he had to say. Then Michael went on to tell of three dark little rooms in “his” tenement where a family of eight, accustomed to better things, had been forced by circumstances to make their home; and where in the dark the germs of tuberculosis had been silently growing, until the whole family were infected. He spoke of a little ten-year-old girl, living in one of these little dark rooms, pushed down on the street by a playmate, an accident that would have been thought nothing of in a healthy child, but in this little one it produced tubercular meningitis and after two days of agony the child died. He told of a delicate girl, who with her brother were the sole wage earners of the family, working all day, and sewing far into the night to make clothes for the little brothers and sisters, who had fallen prey to the white plague. He told instance after instance of sickness and death all resulting from the terrible conditions in this one tenement, until a delicate, refined looking woman down in the audience who had dropped in with her husband for a few minutes on the way to some other gathering, drew her soft mantle about her shoulders with a shiver and whispered: “Really, Charles, it can’t be healthy to have such a terrible state of things in the city where we live. I should think germs would get out and float around to us. Something ought to be done to clean such low creatures out of a decent community. Do let’s go now. I don’t feel as if I could listen to another word. I shan’t be able to enjoy the reception.” But the husband sat frowning and listening to the end of the speech, vouchsafing to her whisper only the single growl: “Don’t be a fool, Selina!”