I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side-wall of the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone. [Illustration: IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING, LISTLESS, WEARY SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES.”] There are a dozen round tables in the room, and at these are seated small groups of men and women drinking beer. Some of the men are workmen, but most are loafers, not of the tramp but of the rough civic type. The women are young, most of them very young, and there is little trace of beauty and almost none of hard brutality in any face among them. They are simply commonplace. As a company the women lack the hale robustness of the men. They are mostly little women, of slight figures, and some add to this a transparency of skin and a feverish brightness of eye which clearly mark the sure burning of consumption. A few are cast in sturdier mould, and, with faces flushed with drink, they look strong and healthy. All seem warmly dressed in cheap, worn garments suited to the season, and there are many touches of finery and some even of taste in their shabby winter hats. Each carries a leather purse in her hand, or allows it to lie on the table before her with her gloves. The hands of nearly all of them are bare, and you see at once that they are large and coarse and very dirty. Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest, completest camaraderie. The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent interchange of men’s and women’s voices. The naturalness and untrammelled social ease have blinded you for a time to what you really see, and then the black reality reveals itself in human degradation below which there is no depth--as though lost, sexless souls were already met upon a common plane of deepest knowledge of all evil. And yet in very truth they are living fellow men and women, in whom have centred the strength of natural love and hope, and centres still the constraining love of a Heavenly Father. Clark is whispering in my ear: “I guess we’d better get out of this. That waiter has his eye on us. In a minute he’ll ask us for our orders.” We pass again through the garish lights that flood the pavements before saloons from whose inner chambers come the tinkling, brassy notes of cheap music. “Are they all like that place we’ve been in?” I ask.