e breathed in down here
some spirit which left us almost feverish in our desire to learn.
Whether it was the opportunity which bred the desire or the desire as
expressed by all these newcomers, fresh from the shackles of their old
lives, which created the opportunity, I leave to the students of such
matters. All I know is that we were offered the best in practical
information, such as the trade schools and the night high schools; the
best in art, the best in music, the best in the drama. I am speaking
always of the newcomer--the emigrant. Sprinkled in with these was the
cheaper element of the native-born, whether of foreign or of American
descent, who spent their evenings on the street or at the cheap
theatres or in the barrooms. This class despised the whole business.
Incidentally these were the men who haunted the bread line, the
Salvation Army barracks, and were the first to join in any public
demonstration against the rich. The women, not always so much by their
own fault, were the type which keeps the charitable associations busy.
I'm not saying that among these there were not often cases of sheer
hard luck. Now and then sickness played the devil with a family and
more often the cussedness of some one member dragged down a half dozen
innocent ones with him, but I do say that when misfortune did come to
this particular class they didn't buck up to it as Helen Bonnington
did or use such means as were at their disposal to pull out of it.
They just caved in. Even in their daily lives, when things were going
well with them, they lost in the glitter and glare of the city that
spark which my middle-class friends lost by stagnation.

Because there was no poetic romance left in their own lives, they
despised it in the lives of others and laughed at it in art. Whatever
went back into the past, they looked upon scornfully as "ancient."
They lived each day as it came with a pride in being up-to-date. As a
result, they preferred musical comedy of the horse play kind to real
music; they preferred cheap melodrama to Shakespere. They lived and
breathed the spirit of the yellow journals.

I don't know what sort of an education it is the Italians come over
here with, but they were a constant surprise to me in their
appreciation of the best in art. And it was genuine--it was simple.
I've heard a good many jokes about the foolishness of giving them a
diet of Shakespere and Beethoven, of Maeterlinck and Mascagni, but that
sort of tal