“Yes, I think more unhappiness, more wrecked lives and characters, more thieves and criminals, really come from the race-track than from all the other evils in your country. It’s not the racing itself, and the spectacular way of your idle rich for wasting their money! No, it’s not that. It’s the way what you call the smaller fry cluster about it, so cruelly and mercilessly ‘on the make,’ as they put it, and infect the rest of the more honest world with their diseased lust for gain without toil. I have watched them and seen them. It is deadly; it stifles every last shred of good out of them! And then the stewards and the jockey clubs themselves try to hide the shameful conditions of things, and drape and hang their veil of lies and hypocrisy and moral debauchery over these buzzing clouds of parasites; and so it goes on! For, indeed, I know them,” she ended, bitterly. “Oh, I know them well!” Durkin thought of the four great Circuits, Eastern, Southern, Western, and Pacific slope, of the huge and complicated and mysteriously half-hidden gambling machinery close beside each great centre of American population, New York and Washington, Chicago and St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, where duplicity and greed daily congregate, where horses go round and round in their killing and spectacular short-speed bursts, and money flashes and passes back and forth, and portly owners sit back and talk of the royal sport, as they did, Durkin told himself, in the days of Tyre and Rome. But day by day, with the waning afternoon, the machinery comes to a stop, the sacrificial two-year-olds are blanketed and stabled, the grand-stands disgorge their crowds, and from some lower channel of the dark machine drift the rail-birds and the tipsters, the bookmakers and touts, the dissolute lives and the debauched moral sensibilities, the pool-room feeders and attendants in the thick of the city itself, the idlers and the criminals. The thought of it filled him with a sudden emotional craving for honesty and clean-living and well-being. He rejoiced in the clear sunlight and the obvious respectability of the Avenue up which they were walking so briskly—for about Frances Candler, he had always found, there lurked nothing of the subterranean and morbidly secretive. She joyed in her wholesome exercise and open air; she always seemed to be pleading for the simplicities and the sanities of existence. She still stood tantalizingly unreconciled, in his mind, to the plane of life on which he had found her.