and breathed anew in their spirits her
warmth, her joy, her powerful peace. They had run bare-headed in the
sun; they had climbed, panting, the jutting mountainside; they had taken
the winds of the world on the topmost peak; they had romped in the woods
and played in the meadow. And then, too, they had fed well, and rested
much, and been content with the generous world.

And in that health and peace of nature at last to Joe had come the great
awakening of his life. The mental stock-taking he had begun on the day
when Lissner had spoken to him, reached there its climax; the confusion
cleared; the chaos took wonderful new shape.

And he was amazed to see how he had changed and grown. He looked back on
the man who had gone down to West Tenth Street as on a callow and
ignorant youth, enthusiastic, but crude and untried. Back through those
past months he went with the search-light of introspection, and then at
last he knew. He had gone down to Greenwich Village crammed with
theories; he had set to work as if he were a sheltered scientist in a
quiet laboratory, where an experiment could be carried through, and
there suddenly he had been confronted with Facts! Facts! those queer
unbudgable things! Facts in a fierce stampede that engulfed and swept
him along and put all his dreams to a galloping test, a test wherein he
had even forgotten his dreams.

He had gone the way of all reformers, first the explosive arousal, then
the theory, then the test.

He went over the Greenwich Village experience with Myra:

"Why," he laughed, "I expected to do great things. Whereas, look, I have
done _nothing_. This strike ends in a little bettering, and a few people
read my paper. It's just a little stir, hardly a dent--a few atoms set
into motion. How slow! how slow! _Patience_! That's the word I've
learned! It will take worlds of time; it will take a multitude striving;
it will take unnumbered forces--education, health-work, eugenics,
town-planning, the rise of women, philanthropy, law--a thousand thousand
dawning powers. Oh, we are only at the faint beginnings of things!"

And he thought of the books he had read, and the theories of which he
had been so sure.

"But," he exclaimed, "was my diagnosis correct? Did I really know the
human muddle? Has any man really mapped out civilization? It's so huge,
complex, varied--so many disorganized forces--who can classify it--label
it? It's bigger than our thought about it. We lay hands on only