V. Vivian stood on the platform, beside a tall oak-stand and a water-pitcher, gazing out over phalanxes of women.  His youthfulness was a matter of general notice.  By contrast with the Mayor’s seamy rotundity and Pond’s powerful darkness, he looked, indeed, singularly boyish and fair.  He was undoubtedly pale, and his face wore an odd look, a little confused and slightly pained.  This, combined with his continuing silence, gave rise to a general suspicion that the young man had fallen a victim to stage-fright.  However, the odd struggle going on in him at his unexpected opportunity was not against fear....

Carlisle regarded Vivian intently, over and through scores of women’s hats.  She was inwardly braced for epithets.  Somewhere in the air she heard the word “anarchist”; but a woman sitting near her said, quite audibly,—­“Looks more like a poet,” ... meaning, let us hope, like a poet as we like to think that poets look; and not as they so often actually look, by their pictures in the magazines....

“I suppose the beginning of helping the poor,” suddenly spoke up the young man on the stand, in a voice so natural and simple as to come as a small shock, “is to stop thinking of them as the poor.  There are useful people in the world, and useless people; good people and bad people.  But when we speak of poor people and rich people, we only make divisions where our Maker never saw any, and raise barriers on the common which must some day all come down.”

The speaker pushed back his blond hair with a gesture which Cally Heth had seen before.  However, all else about him, from the first sight, had seemed to come to her in the nature of a surprise....

“The things in which we are all alike,” said the tall youth, with none of the Mayor’s oratorial thunder, “are so much bigger than the things in which we are different.  What’s rich and poor, to a common beginning and a common end, common sufferings, common dreams?  We look at these big freeholds, and money in bank is a little thing.  On Washington Street, and down behind the Dabney House—­don’t we each alike seek the same thing?  We want life, and more life.  We want to be happy, and we want to be free.  Well—­we know it’s hard to win these prizes when we’re poor, but is it so easy when we’re rich?  To live shut off on a little island, calling the rest common and unclean—­is that being happy and free, is it having life abundantly?  I look around, and don’t find it so.  And that’s sad, isn’t it?—­double frustration, the poor disinherited by their poverty, the rich in their riches....  Don’t you think we shall find a common meeting-place some day, where these two will cancel out?... when reality will touch hands with the poet’s ideal—­

     “And the stranger hath seen in the stranger his brother at last,
     And his sister in eyes that were strange...”

The slum doctor paused.  The confused appearance was gone from his face; he looked now introspective, quite without consciousness of himself; rather like a man listening with somewhat dreamy approbation to the words of another.  And Cally, having felt her antagonism mysteriously slipping away from the moment her eyes rested upon his face, now knew, quite suddenly and definitely, that she wasn’t going to speak to him about the articles.