As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman broken through her devotion, she inevitably suggested the industrial wrongs and oppressions suffered by the women who, forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely drudgery upon which our industrial order depends. At the moment I could recall only one of her starved ambitions which to my knowledge had ever been attained. When a friend tenderly placed a pair of white satin slippers upon the coffined feet of her old mother who for more than ninety years had travelled a long hard road and had stumbled against many stones, the loving heart of the aged daughter overflowed. “It is herself would know how I prayed for white satin shoes for the burial, thinking as how they might make it up to mother, she who never knew where the next pair was coming from and often had to borrow to go to Mass.” I remembered that as my friend and I left the spotless bare room wrapped in the mystery of death and walked back to Hull-House together, we passed a little child who proudly challenged our attention to his new shoes, “shiny” in the first moment of joyous possession. We could but recognize the epitome of the hard struggle of the very poor, from the moment they scramble out of their rude cradles until they are lowered into their “partial payment” graves, to keep shoes upon their feet. The rare moments of touching pleasure when the simple desire for “a new pair” is fulfilled are doubtless indicated in the early fairy tales by the rewards of glistening red shoes or glass slippers to the good child; in the religious allegories which turn life itself into one long pilgrimage, by the promises to the faithful that they shall be shod with the sandals of righteousness and to the blessed ones, who having formally renounced the world, forswearing shoes altogether and humbly walking on without them, that their bruised and torn feet shall yet gleam lily-white on the streets of Paradise. I suddenly saw in this worn old woman who sat before me, what George Sand described as “a rare and austere production of human suffering” and was so filled with a fresh consciousness of the long barren road travelled by the patient mother and daughter, that it merged into the Via Dolorosa of the Poor of the world. It may have been through this suggestion of an actual street that my memory vividly evoked a group of Russian pilgrims I had once seen in Holy Week as they triumphantly approached Jerusalem. Their heads, garlanded in wild flowers still fresh with early dew, were lifted in joyous singing but their broken and bleeding feet, bound in white cloth and thrust into sandals of stripped bark, were the actual sacrifice they were devoutly offering at the Sepulchre. As my mind swiftly came back from the blossoming fields of Palestine to the crowded industrial district of Chicago, I found myself recalling a pensive remark made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a century ago. “Careless Fate never requires of us what we are really capable of doing.”