Across the gloom a shadow flits; I glimpse a sodden face
Wherein the years of sin and toil and care have left their trace:
A wanton laugh—I mark no more, for yonder in the glow
One waiteth me—my love, my star! with welcoming, I know:
Tender and fine is she: withal so stately sweet and fair
My grateful heart thrills to Heaven, to see her standing there!
If this be Woman—pure, benign, Man’s blessed beacon-light,
Then—Christ! What that poor outcast soul that passed me in the night?
* * * * *
The following striking comparison is from The Road from Jerusalem to
Jericho (_Good Housekeeping_), a plea by Frances Duncan for votes for
women on the ground that woman is the ideal samaritan; man the priest
and the Levite who at the present time alone has the power, but lacks
the inclination, to stoop to care for the injured by righting social
wrongs, especially those affecting women. Miss Duncan tells of a
haunting drawing by Frederick Remington:
The central figure is that of a man who has been taken by a band of
Indians; four or five of his captors are about him, and you see the
relentless faces lit with the grim joy of capture. Around the man’s
neck a noose hangs loosely; about him he sees only the inexorable
faces, the wide stretches of the plains, the silences in which there
is no help. The man looks past the plains into the ghastly future that
is just ahead. The picture is called “Missing.”
In this country hardly a day goes by but in it is enacted a tragedy
worse than that of Remington’s picture; and it’s called by the same
name. Take up a paper almost any day in New York and you read of the
disappearance of a girl of fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, or of the
suicide of a girl who has been caught in the horrible undertow from
which, as far as society is concerned, there is no return. Within the
last year, on the various routes between New York and Chicago, no less
than nine hundred and sixty girls have disappeared.
* * * * *