some simple
day-labourer with whom I worked. Art does not affect me, as this kind of
grand simplicity in life does. I keep muttering to myself: there must be
a meaning to our lives somewhere, or else we must sunder this social
fabrication and create a meaning; and so my incantations go on
endlessly.

"The proletarian is that modern sphinx whose thundering interrogative
society will be called upon to answer. You and I know too well that
society hitherto has answered only with belching cannon and vain
vapourings of law, religion, and duty. But the toiling sphinx, who has
time only to ask terrible questions, will some day formulate an
articulate reply to its own question, and then once more we shall see
that our foundations are of sand--sand that will be washed away, by
blood, if need be. Some there are who will weep tears over the sand: the
pleasures and the joy may die, for to me they are cold and false. My joy
cannot find place within the four walls which shut out the misery and
brutality of the world.

"How be a mouthpiece for the poor? How can art master the
master-problem? They who have nothing much to say, often say it well and
in a popular form; they are unhampered by weighty matters. It takes an
eagle to soar with a heavy weight in its grasp. The human being, rocking
to and fro with his little grief, must give way in depth of meaning to
him who is rocked with the grief of generations past, present, and to
come. It is then that love might rise, love so close to agony that agony
cannot last: the love that will search ceaselessly, in the slums, in the
dives, throughout all life, for the inevitable, and will accept no
alternative and no compromise."

This was the man who met Marie at a critical time of her life. He was
about thirty-five years old, had experienced much, had become formed,
had rejected society, but not the ideal. Rather, as he dropped the one,
he embraced more fervently the other. He had consorted with thieves,
prostitutes, with all low human types; and for their failures and their
weaknesses, their ideas and their instincts, he felt deep sympathy and
even an aesthetic appreciation.

Marie, as we have seen, was only seventeen, unformed and wild, full of
youthful passion and social despair, on the verge of what we call
prostitution; reckless, hopeless, with a deep touch of sullenness and
hatred. She was working at the time in the house of one of Terry's
brothers. Katie, too, was employed there; alth