Yet in every other way she took care of
her health--a strange mingling of prudence and subtle hope with
recklessness and frank despair. All her refinement, baffled in
the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical. She would be
neat and well dressed; she would not let herself be seized of
the diseases on the pariah in those regions--the diseases
through dirt and ignorance and indifference.
In the regions she now frequented recklessness was the keynote.
There was the hilarity of the doomed; there was the cynical or
stolid indifference to heat or cold, to rain or shine, to rags,
to filth, to jail, to ejection for nonpayment of rent, to
insult of word or blow. The fire engines--the ambulance--the
patrol wagon--the city dead wagon--these were all ever passing
and repassing through those swarming streets. It was the
vastest, the most populous tenement area of the city. Its
inhabitants represented the common lot--for it is the common
lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to
nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever
being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. The
masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for
the comforts and luxuries. The masses are ignorant; the
classes are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious
and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes
automatically and of necessity stops just short of the
catastrophe point--for the masses must have enough to give them
the strength to work and reproduce.
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