Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West онлайн

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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.

It was in some saner thought inspired by this vision that I walked on across the river to the comparative quiet of the North Side. I needed all the sanity that I could summon. The setting sun had broken for a moment through snow-laden clouds, and it shone in blazing shafts of blood-red light through the hazy lengths of westward streets. Its rays fell warmly upon a wide, deep window as I passed, and the rich reflection caught my eye. For some time I stood still, a prey to conflicting feelings. Just within the window with the shades undrawn, sat a friend in lounging ease before an open fire, absorbed in his evening paper. There flashed before me the scene of our last encounter. We stood at parting on a wharf in the balmy warmth of late winter in the far South. Behind my friend was the brilliant carpeting of open lawns and blooming beds of flowers, and beyond lay the deep olive green of forests of live-oak with palmettos growing in dense underbrush, and the white “shell road” gleaming in the varied play of lights and shadows until it lost itself, in its course to the beach, in the deepening gloom of overdrooping boughs weighted with hanging moss in an effect of tropical luxuriance. And from out that vivid mental picture there came again, almost articulate in its reality, the graceful urging of my friend that I should visit him in his Western home.