I have just come home from a tour through the Mulberry Bend where these creatures herd together. I felt as if I were in Naples again. I thought some parts of Boston were bad enough, but I never saw anything on this side of the water equal to the horrible squalor and loathsomeness of these places. I mean to take all your good advice about being calm, and trying not to feel that it devolves upon me to settle all our social problems this month. I know even better than you the complexity of the difficulties in our congested city life. I have little hope of doing much for this generation of pauperism and vice, but I am determined to do whatever my money and good will can do for laying the foundation of better things in the generation to come. I am going to begin with tenement houses, for there, I believe, lies the root of half of the trouble. I suppose my friends will think that I am getting to be a dreadful doctrinaire. Well, it can’t be helped. I was predestined for that, I believe. My consolation is that you at least will not be bored by all my plans and theories, and will warn me if I get too rabid.... CHAPTER VI. The night after I had first seen Mildred Brewster at aunt Madison’s I lay awake for hours, feverishly tossing upon my pillow, and revolving many thoughts. I then made one resolve. I would try to win the friendship of this woman who had touched me, who had moved me in a way that no one had ever done before. It was not so much by what she had said, for I had heard the same or kindred thoughts expressed by other lips; but I had never before met a woman so strong, well poised and thoughtful, a woman who united girlish grace and charm with all the persistent ardor of one who, I was sure, could not only die for an idea, but, what is far rarer, live for it day by day and year by year, although forced to meet indifference and coldness or the quiet contempt which cuts to the quick in every sensitive nature. As I had sat by the firelight that night, watching the color come and go in her face,—that changeful, eager face,—for the first time in a dreary twelve-month I had felt my heart leap up with warmth and sympathy. From a thoughtless, happy girlhood, from the life of a gay, pleasure-loving young lady, I had been rudely summoned to face some of the bitterest realities of life. No matter what they were. I am not writing about myself. But though my life was still rich and full of opportunities, if I had but known it, yet in my blindness and selfishness it had seemed utterly wrecked to me. I had sunk into a dull, prosaic routine, and under a proud mask of gay indifference was trying to hide a heart dead to hope, ambition, and love. Yet, no! not dead to love, though I had thought it so; but in the heart-hunger which was not satisfied, I was fast becoming self-centred, cold, and cynical.