Yet, what could he do? He must be strong, be wise, keep his head. He had pledged himself, sworn himself into the service of the working class movement. There was no escape. He tried to bury himself in his books, regain for a moment his splendid dream of the future state, feel again those strange throes of world-building, of social service. And out of it all grew a letter, a letter to Myra. He wrote it in a strange haste, the sentences coming too rapidly for his pen. It ran: DEAR MYRA,--I must _make_ you understand! I hurt you when I wanted to help you; I wronged you when I wanted only to do right by you. Why didn't you listen to me this morning? It was at the fire there, at that moment you tugged at my sleeve and I spoke to you, that I saw clearly that my life was no longer my own, that I could not even give it to you, whom I loved, whom I love now with every bit of my existence. I told you I belonged to those dead girls. Have you forgotten? _Sixty of them_--and three of my men. It was as if I had killed them myself. I am a guilty man, and I must expiate this guilt. There is no use fooling myself with pleasant phrases, no use thinking others to blame. It was I who was responsible. And through the death of those girls I learned of the misery of the world, of the millions in want, the women wrenched from their homes to toil in the mills, the little children--fresh, sweet bodies, bubbling hearts, and tender, whimsical minds--slaving in factories, tiny boys and girls laboring like men and women in cotton and knitting mills, in glass factory and coal-mine, and on the streets of cities, upon whose frail little spirits is thrust the responsibility, the wage burden, the money, and family trouble, the care and drudgery and mortal burden we grown people ourselves not seldom find too hard. I have learned of a world gone wrong; I have learned of a new slavery on earth; and I as a member of the master class share the general guilt for the suffering of the poor...I must help to free them from the very conditions that killed the sixty girls... And when I think of those girls and their families (some of them were the sole support of their mothers and sisters and brothers) the least I can do is to render up my life for the, lives that were lost--the least I can do is to fill myself with the spirit of the dead and go forth, not to avenge them, but to help build a world where the living will not be sacrificed as they were.