u going to remain blind to your
condition? The interests of capital and labor are diametrically opposed
to each other. You are the producers of the world's wealth and yet you
submit to exploitation by the class of parasites who fatten upon your
ignorance and your unwillingness to unite. Workingmen of the world, you
have nothing to lose but your chains."

"Slavinsky, the great agitator, probably rehearsing his speech for the
party rally at Cooper Union tomorrow," I explained.

"Agitator?" questioned the apostle of beauty. "He is agitated, indeed,
and unhappy. I shall give him a rose."

Slavinsky sputtered with amazement when the rose was offered to him.

"A joy forever!" he mocked. "It isn't such a joy to work for starvation
wages, to be bled by profiteers, to be flayed alive by plutes. I tell
you, Mister--"

"You are addressing Keats, John Keats."

"I tell you, Mister Keats, there ain't no beauty when you're up against
it. I tell you--"

"Won't you accept this rose?"

"I'll take it," growled Slavinsky with unnecessary fierceness. "It ain't
Nature's fault. She don't go in for profiteering." The agitator's
conversational style was more colloquial though no less vehement than
his platform manner.

"Did you note the omission?" Keats inquired when we were again on the
avenue.

"It isn't impoliteness," I replied. "Men of his class are too stirred by
cosmic problems to say 'Thank you.'"

"It is a beautiful thing to say, nevertheless, and the world needs it."
I thought the eyes of John Keats--a fitting name for such a fantastic
personality--were filling with tears.

My companion held his rose before him as if it were a charm against the
sordidness about him. He had a way of peering at the people we passed as
if he were looking for someone he had lost in the crowd. At Sixteenth
Street we turned into the small park at the right of the avenue, which
with its neighbor on the left keeps alive the memory of green and
growing things among the dwellers of the tenements.

It was at the fountain that he first saw her. John Keats had an abrupt
manner, for all his gentleness, of proceeding along the path of his
desires.

"At last I have found you," he said to the tall girl who was watching a
group of youngsters at play near the gushing waters. In the darkness I
could see only a pair of flashing eyes under a broad-brimmed straw and a
cape of soft blue hanging gracefully from her shoulders.

She scrutinized both of us wit