This insight I got into Claire’s world I found useful, needless to say, in my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism. I would go from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit tenement-dens where little children made paper-flowers twelve and fourteen hours a day for a trifle over one cent an hour. I would spend the afternoon floating about in the park in the automobile of one of her expensive friends, and then take the subway and visit one of the settlements, to hear a discussion of conditions which doomed a certain number of working-girls to be burned alive every year in factory fires. As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention. During the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even towards the lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room. While she was being presented at St. James’s, I was studying the glass-factories in South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten working in front of glowing furnaces until they dropped of exhaustion and sometimes had their eyes burned out. While she and her husband were guests of the German Emperor, I was playing the part of a Polish working-woman, penetrating the carefully guarded secrets of the sugar-trust’s domain in Brooklyn, where human lives are snuffed out almost every day in noxious fumes. And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over. She came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the _de luxe_ steamers; and the next morning I saw a new picture of her, and read a few words her husband had condescended to say to a fellow traveller about the courtesy of Europe to visiting Americans. Then for a couple of months I heard no more of them. I was busy with my child-labour work, and I doubt if a thought of Sylvia crossed my mind, until that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon at Mrs. Allison’s when she came up to me and took my hand in hers. 6. Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories; whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home.