James Oppenheim

“ Yearly they draw closer together, reaching their arms about one another's necks, a solemn yet wild sisterhood. The plains, the hills, and the valleys come with gifts to adorn and feed the tall sisters, and the sisters give back gold and laughter and song. But though their faces are beautiful, their garments are soiled with slums.
Pittsburg, I think, is their siren—a smoky city, whose hair by day drifts gray over the darkening streets, and by night is gusts of fire flaring a lightning along the rivers. ”

“ And the love that has not been sullied by a million years of wars and tyrants and devastations and that has been great enough to create all the glories we know, sowing the continent with cities that whisper to one another over the wires—that love is great enough to re-create this world and tame even the Siren City. ”

“ So we made the tour of the white wards;—in one, babies, assorted as many as twelve to a bed, and a heart-breaking crying, not to be listened to; in another, women, blissful with a peace they never knew on the streets or in the child-cluttered kitchen; in another, youths and men in all attitudes of suffering or convalescence, and, perhaps worst, the typhoid ward with its delirious mutterings. ”

“ Then Lixie came out with a sweet, frail, middle-aged woman, gray-haired, and face drawn a little with much experience and long struggle. She was almost shy, she who had been the little, laughing, brown-eyed girl sweet on Felix Storn, she who had pulled taffy with him all a July afternoon, she who when that first child was born seemed a mere child herself, broken-hearted at nineteen. ”

“ THE cities of America stand with arms of railroads reaching toward one another, and hands linked, and, swaying with life, they sing and whisper to one another over the wires and through the mail-bags. ”

“ Laura was busy in the kitchen; but on the porch I met the two boys, Henry and Felix. I was a mere curiosity to them, but to me they were strangely familiar, so much of their parents was in them, both looks and manners. While we sat, man-fashion, trying to belittle the rising emotions in our hearts, trying to convince ourselves that marriage was an every-day affair, a carriage stopped, and we were overwhelmed with children. It was Isabel and John, one with husband and four-year-old boy and tiny baby, the other with wife and three-year-old girl. ”

“ Her gift to the world is the bone-work of civilization—steel. And she is pitiless as Steel herself, a true siren luring men and women, and crushing them in her infernos. But what are men and women compared with white-hot, ten-ton ingots, the Bessemer converter, and the eight vapor-plumed pipes of the blast-furnace? ”

“ But everywhere the uniformed nurses and orderlies tripping softly, and everywhere Panhurst showing sharp vision and precise thought, a general in the field against disease. Yes, everywhere there was a valiant, almost joyful battle to save human life and to abolish pain. ”

“ Of course children think of their parents and their friends' parents as being old even if they are thirty, but I remembered Lixie's mother as a vivacious, quick little woman, quite pretty, and very sensible and shrewd. ”