a vital experience came to Joe. Snow was
falling outside, and it was near twilight, and in the quiet Joe was busy
at his desk. Then a man came in, well, but carelessly dressed, his face
pinched and haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his hair in stray tufts over
his wrinkled forehead.

"I want to see you a minute, Mr. Blaine."

The voice was shaking with passion.

"Sit down," said Joe, and the man took the seat beside him.

"I'm Mr. Lissner--Albert Lissner--I was the owner of the Lissner
Shirtwaist Company."

Joe looked at him.

"Lissner? Oh yes, over on Eighth Street."

The man went on:

"Mr. Blaine, I had eighty girls working for me.... I always did all I
could for them ... but there was fierce competition, and I was just
skimping along, and I had to pay small wages;... but I was good to
those girls.... They didn't want to strike ... the others made them...."

Joe was stirred.

"Yes, I know ... many of the shops were good...."

"Well," said Lissner, with a shaking, bitter smile, "you and your strike
have ruined me.... I'm a ruined man.... My family and I have lost
everything.... And, it's killed my wife."

His face became terrible--very white, and the eyes staring--he went on
in a hollow, low voice:

"I--I've lost _all_."

There was a silence; then Lissner spoke queerly:

"I happen to know about you, Mr. Blaine.... You were the head of that
printing-place that burnt down...."

Joe felt a shock go through him, as if he had seen a ghost....

"Well, maybe you did all you could for your men;... maybe you were a
good employer.... Yet see what came of it...." Suddenly Lissner's voice
rose passionately: "And yet you had the nerve to come around and get
after us fellows, who were just as good as you. There are bad employers,
and bad employees, too--bad people of every kind--but maybe most people
are good. You couldn't help what happened to you; neither can we help it
if the struggle is too fierce--we're victims, too. It's conditions, it's
life. We can't change the world in a day. And yet you--after your
fire--come here and ruin us."

Joe was shaken to his depths. Lissner had made an overstatement, and yet
he had thrown a new light on the strike, and he had reminded Joe of his
long-forgotten guilt. And suddenly Joe knew. All are guilty; all share
in the corruption of the world--the laborer anxious for mass-tyranny and
distrustful of genius, the aristocrat afraid of soiling his hands, the
capitalist intent on p