The sight of these two together, Mr. Berman's eyes upon her with an unmistakable look, struck him through with jagged pain. He was as a man whose sealed vision an oculist's knife has just released. Amid startled anguish his eyes suddenly opened to things he, in his blindness, had never guessed. He saw what she had come to mean to him. This was so great that, at first, it well-nigh obscured all else. She filled him,--her sympathy, her intelligence, her high womanliness. And she, she that filled him, was ... only a great pain. And then (he had mechanically followed them, and now stood watching the door within which they had disappeared--the door through which he had gone with her three weeks before) he saw, his pain writhing within him the while, the double hopelessness of his love: she was educated, cultured--she could care nothing for a mere workman; and even if she could care, he was bound. And then (he was now moving slowly through the Broadway crowd, scarcely conscious of it) he saw how poor he was in his loveless married life. Since his first liking for Maggie had run its so brief course, he had lapsed by such slow degrees to his present relations with her that he had been hardly more conscious of his life's lacking than if he had been living with an unsympathetic sister. But now that a real love had discovered itself to him, with the suddenness of lightning that rips open the night, he saw, almost gaspingly, how glorious life with love could be; and, by contrast, he saw how sordid and commonplace his own life was; and he saw this life without love stretching away its flat monotony, year after year. And there were things he did not see, for he had not been made aware by the unwritten laws prevailing in a more self-conscious social stratum. And one of these things was, he did not see that perhaps in his social ignorance he had done Ruth some great injury. That night Maggie kept his dinner warm on the back of the kitchen range, to no purpose; and that night Petersen waited vainly on the tenement steps. It was after twelve when Tom came into the flat, his face drawn, his heart chilled. He had seen his course vaguely almost from the first moment of his vision's release; he had seen it clearer and more clear as hour after hour of walking had passed; and he felt himself strong enough to hold to that course. The next morning at breakfast he was gentler with Maggie than he had been in many a day; so that once, when she had gone into the kitchen to refill her coffee cup, she looked in at him for a moment in a kind of resentful surprise. Not being accustomed to peering inward upon the workings of his soul, Tom himself understood this slight change in his attitude no better than did his wife. He did not realize that the coming of the knowledge of love, and the coming of sorrow, were together beginning to soften and refine his nature.