heart, downward, like the clutch of
a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto
such things had the "dead girls" brought him.

So, crammed with theories--theories as yet untested by experience--Joe
became an iconoclast lusting for change. He was bursting with good news,
he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to
proselytize, convert. He was filled with Shelley's passion for reforming
the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to
show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.

All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his
human humorous self--backed by ten years of the printery--told him that
the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments
that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man
expected to achieve such marvels.

But these reactions were swallowed up by the recurrent pulsations, the
spasms of his vision. He felt from day to day a growth of purpose, an
accumulation of energy that would resistlessly spill into action, that
would bear him along, whether or no. But what should he do, and how? He
was unfitted, and did not think he cared, for settlement work. He knew
nothing and cared less for charity work. Politics were an undiscovered
world to him. What he wanted passionately was to go and live among the
toilers, get to know them, and be the means of arousing and training
them.

But then there was the problem of his mother--a woman of sixty-three.
Could he leave her alone? It was preposterous to think of taking her
with him. Myra could a thousand times better go. He must talk with his
mother, he must thresh the matter out with her, he must not delay longer
to clear the issue. And yet he hesitated. Would she be able to
understand? How could he communicate what was bursting in his breast?
She belonged to a past generation; how could she hear the far-off drums
of the advance?

Up and down the Park he went early one evening in a chaos of excitement,
and he had a sudden conviction that he could not put off the moment any
longer. He must go to his mother at once, he must tell all. As he
walked down the lamp-lit street, under all the starriness of a tranquil
autumn night, he became alternately pale and flushed, his heart thumped
hard against his ribs, he felt like a little boy going to his mother to
confess a wrong.

He looked up; the shades of the second floor w