o brush could scrub away. How different was her palm! He
thrilled deliciously at the remembrance. Like a rose-petal, he thought;
cool and soft as a snowflake. He had never thought that a mere woman's
hand could be so sweetly soft. He caught himself imagining the wonder of
a caress from such a hand, and flushed guiltily. It was too gross a
thought for her. In ways it seemed to impugn her high spirituality. She
was a pale, slender spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but
nevertheless the softness of her palm persisted in his thoughts. He was
used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women. Well
he knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was
soft because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned between
her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not have to work
for a living. He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who did not
labor. It towered before him on the wall, a figure in brass, arrogant
and powerful. He had worked himself; his first memories seemed connected
with work, and all his family had worked. There was Gertrude. When her
hands were not hard from the endless housework, they were swollen and red
like boiled beef, what of the washing. And there was his sister Marian.
She had worked in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty
hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives. Besides, the tips of two
of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at the paper-box
factory the preceding winter. He remembered the hard palms of his mother
as she lay in her coffin. And his father had worked to the last fading
gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been half an inch thick
when he died. But Her hands were soft, and her mother's hands, and her
brothers'. This last came to him as a surprise; it was tremendously
indicative of the highness of their caste, of the enormous distance that
stretched between her and him.

He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off his
shoes. He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman's face and by
a woman's soft, white hands. And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on the
foul plaster-wall appeared a vision. He stood in front of a gloomy
tenement house. It was night-time, in the East End of London, and before
him stood Margey, a little factory girl of fifteen. He had seen her home
after the bean-feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not