Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and women on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood in the way of men’s getting hold of life and living it earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past being startled. “It is a quality of our lives,” he decided. “American men and women have not learned to be clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean plains.” He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his lonely wanderings, began talking to himself. “We are no finer nor cleaner than these,” he said, “and we sprang from the big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months. Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?” “It won’t unless you help,” came the answer from some hidden part of him. Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice, and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the playing of baseball on Sunday. As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague charm. “For me,” he reflected, “there have been no François Villons or Sapphos in the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces and torn, greasy finery.”