Two Sides of the ShieldBy Princess Lazarovick-Hrebelianovich(Nee, Eleanor Calhoun—Actress of American birth. From an article in “Century Magazine.”)
By Princess Lazarovick-Hrebelianovich
(Nee, Eleanor Calhoun—Actress of American birth. From an article in “Century Magazine.”)
Nowhere more than in London does the blazing shield show a dark reverse. For, along with the splendors of life, that ancient city brought me, too, the first overwhelming sense of the world’s misery. For sometime my life took me daily through a large stretch of London. It seemed to me that I was wandering through vast tides of woe. Age-long tyrannies of ignorance and vice and suffering have welded a fixity of type in the flesh, binding enormous segregations into more or less uniform kinds of peoples. The misery-sodden “lower classes,” as I heard them called, seemed narrowed and fixed and starved and warped forever. The “lower middle classes” gave the impression of being jammed in between walls from above and below, as if all broad or wholesome feeling, or generous enjoyment of beauty were kept from penetrating to them or issuing from them. The “upper middle classes” and the “higher classes” appeared to look with horror upon any real contact with the others, while intermarrying with them was impossible.... It was the vast crowds of the others, “the wholesale lot”, that reflected their discouragement in my mind.