From Polk Street and State I drifted northward to the river. No longer was there any stimulus in contact with the intermingling crowds. All that was hard and sordid in one’s lot seemed to have blinded one to all but the hard and sordid in the world about. Beneath its structural veiling you could not see the warm heart of life, tender and strong and true. Multitudes of human faces passed you, deeply marked with the lines of baser care. Human eyes looked out of them full of the unconscious tragic pathos of the blind, blind to all vision but the light of common day; eyes of the money grubbers, sharpened to a needle’s point yet incapable of deeper insight than the prospect of gain; eyes of the haunted poor, furtive in the fear of things, and seeing only the incalculable, threatening hand of fateful poverty; eyes of ragged children who were selling papers on the streets, their eyes old with the age of the ages, as though there gazed through them the unnumbered generations of the poor who have endured “long labor unto aged breath;” eyes of the rich, hardened by a subtler misery in the artificial lives they lead in sternest bondage to powers in whom all faith is gone, but whom they serve in utter fear, scourged by convention to the acting of an unmeaning part in life, seeking above all things escape from self in the fantastic _stimuli_ of fashion, yet feeling ever, in the dark, the remorseless closing in of the contracting prison walls of self-indulgence narrowing daily the scope of self, and threatening life with its grimmest tragedy, in the hopeless, faithless, purposeless _ennui_ of existence. And now there passed me in the street two sisters of charity walking side by side. Their sweet, placid faces, framed in white, reflected the limpid purity of unselfish useful living, and their eyes, deep-seeing into human misery and evil, were yet serene in the all-conquering strength of goodness.