A single gaslight burned in the sick-room, shaded with a green globe and turned down very low.  The electric fan was silent, and the faint fever-smell was in the air.  In the nearer white bed the nurse slept, with light snores.  In the other, Kern Garland slept, lying almost at the bed’s edge.  One of her arms had wandered from the covers; the small hand was curled about the polished leg of Writing-Desk, which was squeezed as close to the bed as it would go.

Vivian went in on silent feet.  Presently he sat down in his accustomed chair on the farther side of the bed.  He stared fixedly at the small flushed face, which looked more elfin than ever now that the flesh was wasting away....

What demerit had this little girl that she should be ordered to give up her health and life only that others might wear fine raiment and live in kings’ houses?  Surely it was not God who had laid that sentence upon her.

Corinne Garland and the Heth Works:  it was long since these two had first seized his mind like a watchword.  For here was no matter of one small girl who worked more hours than her strength would bear; no matter even of one large factory which harnessed the life of three hundred men and women and drove them over-hard.  But was not this the perfect symbol of that preying of the fortunate upon the unfortunate, of that crushing inequality of inheritance, which reacted so deadeningly upward and downward, and more than anything else hobbled the feet of Man?  By one flagrant instance, by Kern at Heth’s, all the pitiful wrong-headedness was made plain.  Pinned forever to the accident of economic birth, all their energies sucked up by the struggle for bread and meat, these poor were mocked with bitter “equality” which did not equalize, but despoiled of all chance to extricate themselves from their poverty.  And their terrible revenge was to spread their own stagnation upward.  Neither could the rich extricate themselves from their riches.  The sorriest thing in the picture was that they did not desire to.  Behold how blindly they struggled to cut the brotherly cord that bound them to what was common and unclean, and that cord their souls’ one light....

The still young man looked at the face of his little patient, and his mind went back to that day when he and O’Neill had visited the Heth Works, last October, and he had seen Kern at her machine.  He had come back ablaze, and he had then written that Severe Arraignment which Mr. Heth had threatened to sue the “Post” for publishing, but never had....  And then ... and then he had thought that perhaps nothing so loud and harsh would be needed.  Hopeful months went by.  Then trouble had come to a family, and he had stayed his hand again....  And now, Kern Garland, who was dear to him, whose right and need he had failed to voice....

“Oh!... Mr. V.V.!”

Without warning, the little girl sat up in bed, her cheeks bright, her eyes wide and shining.  Yet it seemed that she had called Mr. V.V.’s name a little before her eyes fell upon his silent figure.