The next day was Sunday. As she dressed she tried to decide whether she would go to church or not, and concluded that she would not. There were a number of books, she thought rebelliously, which would prove more profitable than Arnold's sermon. So, after breakfast, she made herself comfortable by the window in the library, and began one--one of the many, incidentally, which Good had sent to her. She saw him infrequently, but his books came constantly, and she often wondered if he appreciated the subtle compliment he paid her with each one of what she knew must be a slender treasure. They came spasmodically, as if he rushed them to her when some fancy was hot in his mind. There would be a poem, with characteristic comment all around the margins of the page, and an injunction on the fly leaf to "skip the rest"; or a ponderous volume of economics, with the information that it was poppycock, save for a paragraph on page 266. Sometimes it would be only a pencilled scrap of paper, with an amusing anecdote thereon, or just an illuminating epigram. He seemed to wish to share with her the pleasures of his mind. No one had ever shown that wish to her before. The volume in her hand had come from him only a day or two before. It was thick and heavy and very austerely bound. It surprised her to see that it was new. He seldom sent her new books. She glanced idly through the pages before she happened to note the title. Then her whole manner changed. It was as if someone had spoken to her sharply. The words burned themselves into her consciousness. The small gilt letters shouted like live things. "Proceedings of the Congressional Committee of Inquiry into the Conditions Obtaining in the Algoma Mine Fields." As she went on from the title to the contents, her indolent apathy changed rapidly to intent immersion. Occasionally her fingers clinched involuntarily and her eyebrows knitted. Once she even dropped the book and covered her eyes with her hands. It was a terrible narrative which unfolded itself before her, made more terrible by the emotionless dispassion of the telling. It was a story of bribery and corruption, of murder begetting murder, with the stupid folly of more murder as its cure, of the weakest and most helpless paying the price, of race hatred, of greed,--the whole nauseous catalogue of human frailties was laid before her, with less feeling than the Homeric catalogue of ships. As her imagination took fire, it seemed to her that the poison of selfishness, festering in a far-away hole in the ground, had oozed out and over the land, marking its slimy trail in legislatures, in churches, in the homes of the highest, until, finally, it had reached her own library. She grew sick and faint as the pestilential tale expanded, and horror was piled upon horror.