The majority of these toilers were ready to receive, or had long since received, the seeds of tuberculosis; few could continue their work for five years, and ninety-five per cent., as a drunken young college undergraduate one evening cheerfully informed Mary, were suffering from one or other, and sometimes from all three, of the trio of diseases common to their business. Out from those stuffy bedrooms and those smoke-clouded, song-filled cafés, men carried the scourging social illnesses to innocent wives and to unborn children destined to dwarfed or sightless lives. The sufferer might believe himself cured and bear infection years later. "Now, take yourself, for instance," the lad had resumed, his cheeks still rosy with youth, but his eyes aflame with liquor. "I know something about these things; but I couldn't tell whether you were free or not. You might be sick a long time before even you could tell, and then you wouldn't risk starvation by telling about it. You might be sick right now for all I know. But look out for the worst of all!" Mary heard him with as little heed as she had heard most men. She had learned all that he said from women who knew more of it than, she hoped, this boy would ever know, and she had been well assured that it was a danger that no preventive could wholly defy and no care be certain to escape. After all, she used to reflect, nothing much mattered. She had nothing pleasant to look forward to and, therefore, she wisely refrained, save for one advancing idea, from looking forward. She had no past that did not have its pain for her vision, and, therefore, with this sole exception, she resolutely kept her eyes upon the present day.