y it came to her that
perhaps it lay within her power to build up the structure of
dissatisfaction that he was exposing to her.

"You know how foolish it is," she said. "You have intelligence, you
see where fighting leads. Why strike back? Go with the tide; it is
not trying to overwhelm you, only to do you good. There'd be few
knocks then."

"Ah," he cried bitterly, "but it's too late. The poison of resistance
has flooded our veins, and as yet there is no antidote. Slowly it has
been weaving itself into the very fibre of my character; I can't help
it. At moments like this I see, for my mind still retains some of its
sense of proportion . . . but part of the poison of it is that we do
more with our hands, these hands you hate, than with our minds. Ten
years it has been coursing through me. Can I alter my stature by a
thought? As I talk to you I'm able to stand aside and watch the
horrible thing, but gnawing always at me is the memory of those early
days of panic."

She shook her head. "You'll never understand," she sighed. "I hoped
you would."

"But I do understand. It's you can't, because you never stood on
foreign shore--alone."

"Yet it is better than home, or you wouldn't come in your thousands."

"Better than home, yes, but worse than we hoped. Only those who flee
the rude traditions, the heartless laws, the ignorance and comfortless
life of worn-out Europe can see the pictures the very word 'America'
rouses in us. I don't know whether it is not more the fault of our
ignorance than of the boasts of those who have already gone, of those
who would profit by our going, that we land with hopes nothing on earth
could justify. And, not finding the milk and honey flow out to lave
our ship, we start depressed and resentful. We land in a strange
country with only a word of its language. No one greets us, no one
holds our fumbling hands. By dirty ways we slink to dirty tenement
houses to hide ourselves--where disloyalty is the air we breath,
discomfort our bed, and robbery our experience--robbed by the very
friends who preceded us. Half-cowed, lonely, cursing in silence the
drudgery that faces us, we learn to live for ourselves alone.
Helpless, we drift into the hands of our own kind, who wax rich on the
sale of us in herds to work no one else would undertake. Sullen, keen
to the injustice of things, but ignorant of the simplicity of redress,
we fall victims to our own morbid hatreds, to anything