In this mood he climbed his steep stairs, and sat down at his little deal table, glowing with the ideas that flowered out of his touch of revolt. The author of The Silver Poppy would have opened her gray-green eyes in wonder had she read those sheets which he flung off under his quick, nervous pen. How were these women, he asked himself as he wrote, who wasted so lightly when there were so many in want, how were these women who knew nothing of real life, rustling so well clad through their softly lighted libraries, to know anything of the great tragic, turgid, naked world, of the storm and stress of life? What did they, sitting secluded behind their roses, know of the dust and tumult and tragedy of the street? Let them go out and suffer and learn, and if through hunger and tears and loneliness they found some hidden meaning and purpose in the dark undercurrents of adversity and defeat, then let them in all patience and humility speak what they had to say. Willingly enough the world would listen, without their thousand and one artifices to catch its languid ear. But until then they should get no help from him. And when he had finished his article on Cordelia Vaughan he sat back in his hard chair and felt more at peace with the world and with himself. He felt, as he glanced around at his broken walls and his ragged furniture, that he had justified himself; for he was at heart still buoyant and young. It is a sorrowful day when the eyes of youth can gaze openly into the eyes of defeat. Hartley, as a graduate of Oxford and a regenerator of mankind, could not boast unduly of his New World lodgings--he had not yet learned to speak of them as apartments. He still wrote to three or four of his older college friends from time to time, and to these old friends he half-heartedly enlarged on how a few months in the poorer quarters would help him on with his work. He said nothing, however, of the advantages of a furnished room at three dollars a month, with a shop conveniently below where Italian bread--which was perhaps tough of fiber, but still marvelously sustaining--could be bought for three cents a loaf, and coffee at two cents a cup. He did not confess either that there were days when the sights and smells of the place sickened him, and times when the wailing of small children and sick babies kept him feverishly awake through the long, hot summer nights, and the sounds of brutal quarrels drove him distracted into the open streets for hours at a time. Even with himself he still tried to excuse his unsightly surroundings by the sophistry that the stern quest of experience demanded such environment, that these were the refining fires which were to burn away the dross of his dilettanteism.