For my part, believing as I do that the salvation of the race depends upon unmasking the falsehoods of our class-morality--the institution which I call “marriage plus prostitution”--I cannot but sigh for this lost story. What an awakening it would have brought to the mothers of our so-called “better classes,” if Jack London had ever given to the world the true story of his experiences with their daughters! As a school boy in Oakland, for example, with the young girls of the comfortable classes in that city! He and his companions, sons of workingmen and poor people, looking up to the great world above them inquiringly, made the strange discovery that these shining, golden-haired pets of luxury, guarded at home and in their relations with their social equals by the thousand sleepless eyes of scandal, found it safe and pleasant to repair to secret rendezvous among the willow thickets of Lake Merritt, and there play the nymph to handsome and sturdy fauns of a class below the level ever reached by the thousand sleepless eyes! When you listened to a narrative such as that, you realized the grim meaning that Jack London put into his essay, “What Life Means to Me,” telling of the embitterment that came to him when he, the oyster pirate and roustabout, broke into the “parlor floor of society”: Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and prostitution itself. Jack London had a dream of another kind of love; the dream of a strong, free, proud woman, the mate for a strong, free, proud man. This dream came into his writings at the start; into “A Daughter of the Snows,” his third novel--the very name of it, you perceive. This story, published in the second year of the present century, was crude and boyish, but it had the promise of his dawning greatness, and was the occasion of my first letter to him, and the beginning of our friendship. Afterwards he told this same dream of the perfect mating, over and over again; he continued to tell it long after he had ceased to believe in it.