Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/194

 of the foundations on which the marble palace rested. It appeared to have arisen miraculously with the aid and sanction of God, innocent of all connection with the stinking Flats.

Mary, watching the spectacle about her, felt her heart turning to stone. If she was to be saved from bitterness, it would only be, she believed, through the touching faith of the ignorant wretches about her. She came to feel a sympathy for the cursing of a man like Finke: she herself even wanted at times to curse. She understood the sullen drunkenness of men like Sokoleff. What else was there for them to do? Something—perhaps a sense of dull misery, perhaps a terror of death—had slowly softened their resentment toward herself and Irene Shane. Once they had been looked upon as intruders come down from the Hills to poke about in filthy hallways and backyards filled with piles of rubbish and rows of privies. But it was no lenger possible to doubt them. The two women, gently bred and fastidious, slept night after night at the school in the midst of the Flats. They sat up night after night by the beds of the dying.

There were times when Mary wondered why Irene Shane poured out all her strength in succoring these wretched people. She sensed deep in Irene a strange kind of unearthly mysticism which made her seem at times stubborn and irritable. It was a mysticism strangely akin to that groping hunger which had always tormented Philip. The likeness came to her suddenly one night as she sat by the bed of one of Finke's dying children. It seemed to her a strange and inexplicable likeness in people so different. Yet it was true—they were both concerned with shadowy problems of