DO NOT STAND before my window with those hungry eyes and beg for my secret. It is but a tiny stone of glistening pain streaked with blood-red by passion. What gifts have you brought in both hands to fling before me in the dust? I fear, if I accept, to create a debt that can never be paid even by the loss of all I have. Do not stand before my window with your youth and flowers to sham my destitute life.
THE EVENING stood bewildered among street lamps, its gold tarnished by the city dust. A woman, gaudily decked and painted, leant over the rail of her balcony, a living fire waiting for its moths. Suddenly an eddy was formed in the road round a street-boy crushed under the wheels of a carriage, and the woman on the balcony fell to the floor screaming in agony, stricken with the grief of the great white-robed Mother who sits in the world's inner shrine.