with
segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the
hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the
heartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole moving
picture.
You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue
rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a
clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress
is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse,
perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if
you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that
her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming
experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has
donned to hide a turbulent heart--the dowry of centuries of
grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to
comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted
to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and
happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and
the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must be
carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."
Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of our
fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be
heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for
their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll
of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on
having two things long denied womankind--freedom and happiness. If she
is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the
more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your
help and sympathy.
"_Learn to look into the hearts of men._"
Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinder
doing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not just
an old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings and
longings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter if
the organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the _spirit_ of the aria or
the intermezzo.
And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and bold
street-arabs--at least that is what they look like from the outside.
But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of their
appearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathiz
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