And, added to all this, there was the constant depressive contact with unsympathetic and foul-mouthed desecrators of ambition. Those who knew me in that room were aware that I was trying to avoid every degenerative and impure act. Some of them passed word around also that I was attending such and such a church! They came to the end of the mule, when the boss chanced not to be around, and, in a huddled group, stood at my elbows, where I had work to do, and put on their dirty lips the foulest vocabulary that ever stained foul air. Then one day there came a flash which clearly lighted up everything. “Why are you going through this wild, unequal labor in this dull room day by day! Why? Do you absolutely have to do it? Are others keeping at it, as you? Why, why, why?” each one bigger than its fellow, made me meet every fact squarely. “To what end all this?” My labor was helping to buy beer at home! I was giving up all my wage to my aunt, and getting back a little spending money. I had fifteen cents in the bank at the time. I did not _have_ to overstrain myself as I was doing. I _had_ the privilege of giving up my work at any moment I chose. I was no slave to such conditions. No man could drive me to such tasks. Giving up the work only meant a scolding from my aunt and a little going about among other mills to find another, and perhaps better, position. This was a new thought to me--that I could leave my work when I wanted; that I might be given work too hard for me. Previously I had worked on the supposition that whatever was given me _ought_ to be done at all costs; that the _mill_ was the measure of a man, and not _man_ the measure of the mill. I had always looked upon my work as a test of my moral capacity; that any refusal to work, even when it was harder than I could bear, was a denial of my moral rights. But now the worm of conscience was boring through me. Why should I, at twenty years of age, not be entitled to what I earned, to spend on my education, instead of its being spent on my aunt’s appetite for intoxicants? Then, too, why should I have to work with people who had no moral or mental sympathy with me? Was five dollars and seventy-five cents, my pay for the first week in that gloomy room, worth it? Assuredly not. But, then, what could I do outside of the mill? I had done nothing else but work in the mill and spend a little time on a farm. If I left the mill at so late a time, left all the technical knowledge I had gathered while I had been going through it, should I be doing the best thing for my future? There seemed nothing in the future from the mill, for, as I have shown, I had not the strength to cope with more difficult tasks than those that then faced me. Probably if I got out of doors, in some open-air work, I should gain strength and be able to make progress in some other line of work. But I had been trying for that, and nothing had come. What then?