From Australia--To the Wives

THERE were about a dozen people standing or sitting around the shabby little room to which I had been led, after stumbling up a rickety staircase in the dark. Looking, 'round I could see men whose bearing and strained expression told of many years of misery and haunted loneliness. A group of women in a corner could be to my way of thinking the only brightness in that room. The picture of the women, the men, the room, is stamped on my mind forever. Nobody had spoken, but something told me, "this is it, this is what you have been looking for, this is what you have thought was anywhere but where you were."