r phalanxes of women. His youthfulness was
a matter of general notice. By contrast with the Mayor's seamy rotundity
and Pond's powerful darkness, he looked, indeed, singularly boyish and
fair. He was undoubtedly pale, and his face wore an odd look, a little
confused and slightly pained. This, combined with his continuing
silence, gave rise to a general suspicion that the young man had fallen
a victim to stage-fright. However, the odd struggle going on in him at
his unexpected opportunity was not against fear....

Carlisle regarded Vivian intently, over and through scores of women's
hats. She was inwardly braced for epithets. Somewhere in the air she
heard the word "anarchist"; but a woman sitting near her said, quite
audibly,--"_Looks_ more like a _poet_," ... meaning, let us hope, like a
poet as we like to think that poets look; and not as they so often
actually look, by their pictures in the magazines....

"I suppose the beginning of helping the poor," suddenly spoke up the
young man on the stand, in a voice so natural and simple as to come as a
small shock, "is to stop thinking of them as the poor. There are useful
people in the world, and useless people; good people and bad people. But
when we speak of poor people and rich people, we only make divisions
where our Maker never saw any, and raise barriers on the common which
must some day all come down."

The speaker pushed back his blond hair with a gesture which Cally Heth
had seen before. However, all else about him, from the first sight, had
seemed to come to her in the nature of a surprise....

"The things in which we are all alike," said the tall youth, with none
of the Mayor's oratorial thunder, "are so much bigger than the things in
which we are different. What's rich and poor, to a common beginning and
a common end, common sufferings, common dreams? We look at these big
freeholds, and money in bank is a little thing. On Washington Street,
and down behind the Dabney House--don't we each alike seek the same
thing? We want life, and more life. We want to be happy, and we want to
be free. Well--we know it's hard to win these prizes when we're poor,
but is it so easy when we're rich? To live shut off on a little island,
calling the rest common and unclean--is that being happy and free, is it
having life abundantly? I look around, and don't find it so. And that's
sad, isn't it?--double frustration, the poor disinherited by their
poverty, the rich in their riches.