"I am still hardly more than a girl," she said. "But to me the world
seems full of wretchedness. The world has altered since your day, altered
very strangely. I have prayed that I might see you and tell you these
things. The world has changed. As if a canker had seized it--and robbed
life of--everything worth having."
She turned a flushed face upon him, moving suddenly. "Your days were the
days of freedom. Yes--I have thought. I have been made to think, for my
life--has not been happy. Men are no longer free--no greater, no better
than the men of your time. That is not all. This city--is a prison. Every
city now is a prison. Mammon grips the key in his hand. Myriads,
countless myriads, toil from the cradle to the grave. Is that right? Is
that to be--for ever? Yes, far worse than in your time. All about us,
beneath us, sorrow and pain. All the shallow delight of such life as you
find about you, is separated by just a little from a life of wretchedness
beyond any telling. Yes, the poor know it--they know they suffer. These
countless multitudes who faced death for you two nights since--! You owe
your life to them."
"Yes," said Graham, slowly. "Yes. I owe my life to them."
"You come," she said, "from the days when this new tyranny of the cities
was scarcely beginning. It is a tyranny--a tyranny. In your days the
feudal war lords had gone, and the new lordship of wealth had still to
come. Half the men in the world still lived out upon the free
countryside.
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