"Don't!" said Eleanore. "Leave it alone!" Her voice was so sharp it
startled me.

"Why?" I rejoined. "You've tackled poverty often enough. I guess I can
stand it if you can."

"You're different," she answered. "You leave poverty alone and force
yourself to go on with your work. You've made a very wonderful start.
You'll be ready to take up fiction soon. When you have, and when you
have gone so far that you can feel sure of your name and yourself, then
you can look at whatever you like."

"I wonder what Joe would say to that."

"I know what he'll say--he'll agree with me. Why don't you ask him and
see for yourself? I'm beginning to like Joe Kramer," she added with a
quiet smile, "because now that I understand him I know that his life and
yours are so far apart you've hardly a point in common."

And in the talks I had with Joe this soon proved to be the case.
Eleanore brought us together now and listened with deep satisfaction as
we clashed and jarred each other apart.

His old indifferent manner was gone, he was softened, grateful for what
we had done--but he held to that view of his like a rock, and the view
entirely shut me out. Joe saw society wholly as "War Sure" between two
classes, and I was hopelessly on the wrong side. My work, my home and my
whole life were bound in with the upper class. And there could be no
middle ground. My boasted tolerance, breadth of mind, my readiness to
see both sides, my passion for showing up all men as human--this to Joe
was utter piffle. He had no use for such writing, or in fact for art of
any kind. "Propaganda" was all that he wanted, and that could be as
cheap as Nick Carter, as sentimental as Uncle Tom's Cabin, if only it
had the kind of "punch" that would reach to the mass of ignorant workers
and stir their minds and their passions into swift and bitter revolt.
Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said,
when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into
an age of force--of "direct action"--strikes and the like--by prodigious
masses of men. All I could do was worthless.

These talks made me so indignant and sore, so sure that Joe and all his
work were utterly wild and that only in Dillon and his kind lay any hope
of solving the dreary problems of the slums--that within a few days more
I was delving into my opera man with a most determined approval. He at
least was a builder, he didn't want to tear everything down! In his
e