people are no better
'n cattle. At least they ought to give 'em a trough to wash in and a
place where they could buy decent food."

"A few other things, too, perhaps," the judge added with his gentle
smile. "But who will do it? The city is already badly debt-ridden. The
owners of the land pay so much in taxes and interest, due to the high
price of the land here, that they probably make a bare eight per cent
net on their investment."

He looked inquiringly at the young man.

"It's all wrong," the mason retorted heatedly, forgetting that he had
hoped to become one of these "owners of the land," and returning to his
incipient rebellion at the state of society in which he lived. "Somebody
ought to be made to do such things."

The judge smiled finely, merely remarking in a casual tone,--

"It is a very perplexing question, all that, my young friend!"

"But you don't think it's right so," the mason persisted belligerently,
thinking to challenge a supporter of things as they are.

"There's very little that is quite right in this world, my boy," the
judge replied simply.

"Well, we'd better set out now to make it nearer right," the young man
grumbled.

"Oh, yes, that is perfectly sound doctrine.... And shall we begin with
Clark's Field?" he asked, turning to Adelle with one of his playful,
kindly smiles.

"It needs it," she said simply.

"Yes, I think it needs it!"

"Sure!" the mason asserted resoundingly.

A little while afterwards the judge said to the driver,--

"I think that we will go home now, John."

XLIX

In these last moments something had happened to Adelle. While the judge
and her cousin had been talking, she had been watching the stream of
humanity flow past her, not hearing what the two were saying, listening
to the voice of her own soul. It is difficult to describe in exact words
the nature of Adelle's mental life. Ideas never came to her in orderly
succession. They were not evolved out of other ideas, nor gathered up
from obvious sources and repeated by her brain, parrotlike, as with so
many of us. They came to her slowly from some reservoir of her being,
came painfully, strugglingly, and often were accompanied to their birth
by an inner glow of emotional illumination like the present when she saw
herself and her child living the life of Clark's Field. But after they
had struggled into birth, they became eternal possessions of her
consciousness, never to be forgotten, or debated, or