indefatigable, heroic in endurance, though they toil on sweated wages. The women of the well-to-do middle-classes drift apart from their husbands because perhaps they have irritable little habits, because they do not understand all the yearnings in their wives’ hearts, because they have fallen below the old ideals of their courting days. But here in the slums these women with a grievance would find other women loyal to their husbands who come home drunk at nights, loyal through thick and thin to husbands who “bash” them when they speak a sharp word, loyal to the death to husbands who are untamed brutes with only the love of the brute for its mate. There is no problem of the Eighth Year in Poverty Court, only the great problems of life and death, of hunger and thirst and cold, of labor and want of work. Here in the mean streets of the world is the great lesson that want of work is the greatest disaster, the greatest moral tragedy, that may happen to men and women. If the idle women of the little snobdoms would come forth from their houses and flats, they would see that lesson staring them in the face, with a great warning to themselves. And if they would thrust aside their selfishness and learn the love of humanity, it would light a flame in their hearts which would kindle the dead ashes of their disillusionment and burn up their grievances, and make a bonfire of all their petty little troubles, and make such a light in their lives as would enable them to see the heroic qualities of ordinary duties bravely done, and of ordinary lives bravely led. Here they would find another way of escape from the perils of the Eighth Year, and a new moral health for their hearts and brains. It is only now and then that some woman is lucky enough to find this way out, for snobbishness enchains them, and it is difficult to break its fetters. CHAPTER XIII