and miserable, and often she would barely have strength
enough to drag herself home. And there they would eat
what they had to eat, and afterwards, because there was
only their misery to talk of, they would crawl into bed
and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time to
get up again, and dress by candle-light, and go back to
the machines. They were so numbed that they did not
even suffer much from hunger, now; only the children
continued to fret when the food ran short.

Yet the soul of Ona was not dead -- the souls of none
of them were dead, but only sleeping; and now and then
they would waken, and these were cruel times. The
gates of memory would roll open -- old joys would stretch
out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call
to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay
upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight.
They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish
would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death.
It was a thing scarcely to be spoken -- a thing never spoken
by all the world, that will not know its own defeat.

They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were
swept aside. It was not less tragic because it was so
sordid, because that it had to do with wages and grocery
bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a
chance to look about them and learn something; to be
decent and clean, to see their child grow up to be strong.
And now it was all gone -- it would never be! They
had played the game and they had lost. Six years more
of toil they had to face before they could expect the
least respite, the cessation of the payments upon the
house; and how cruelly certain it was that they could
never stand six years of such a life as they were living!
They were lost, they were going down -- and there was
no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave
them the vast city in which they lived might have been
an ocean waste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb. So often
this mood would come to Ona, in the night-time, when
something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the beat~
ing of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the

[[163]]

p162 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p163w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p164

v?