As if drawn by a magnet, these forlorn women issued forth from the many homes in which dwelt “the two unprofitable goddesses, Poverty and Impossibility.” Occasionally it seemed to me that the women were impelled by a longing to see one good case of retribution before they died, as a bullied child hopes to deal at least one crushing blow at his tormentor when he “grows up,” but I think, on the whole, such an explanation was a mistake; it is more probable that the avidity of the women demonstrated that the story itself, like all interpretative art, was “one of those free, unconscious attempts to satisfy, outside of life, those cravings which life itself leaves unsatisfied.” At moments, however, baffled desires, sharp cries of pain, echoes of justices unfulfilled, the original material from which such tales are fashioned, would defy Memory’s appeasing power and break through the rigid restraints imposed by all Art, even that unconscious of itself. With an understanding quickened, perhaps, through my own acquaintance with the mysterious child, I listened to many tragic reminiscences from the visiting women; of premature births, “because he kicked me in the side”; of children maimed and burnt because “I had no one to leave them with when I went to work”; women had seen the tender flesh of growing little bodies given over to death because “he wouldn’t let me send for the doctor,” or because “there was no money to pay for the medicine.” But even these mothers, rendered childless through insensate brutality, were less pitiful than some of the others, who might well have cried aloud of their children as did a distracted mother of her child centuries ago: “That God should send this one thing more Of hunger and of dread, a door Set wide to every wind of pain!” Such was the mother of a feeble-minded boy who said: “I didn’t have a devil baby myself, but I bore a poor ‘innocent’ who made me fight devils for twenty-three years.” She told of her son’s experiences from the time the other little boys had put him up to stealing that they might hide in safety and leave him to be found with “the goods on him,” until grown into a huge man he fell into the hands of professional burglars; he was evidently the dupe and stool-pigeon of the vicious and criminal until the very day he was locked into the State Penitentiary. “If people played with him a little, he went right off and did anything they told him to, and now he’s been sent up for life. We call such innocents ‘God’s Fools’ in the old country, but over here the Devil himself gets them. I’ve fought off bad men and boys from the poor lamb with my very fists; nobody ever came near the house except such-like and the police officers, who were always arresting him.”