Various feelings had gradually stiffened
an early general approval into a rock-ribbed resolve. It was on a
closely allied theme that he had first won his editorial spurs--the
theme of Klinker's "blaggards," who made reformatories necessary. That
was one thing: a kind of professional sentiment which the sternest
scientist need not be ashamed to acknowledge. And then, beyond that, his
many talks with Klinker had invested the campaign for the reformatory
with a warmth of meaning which was without precedent in his experience.
This was, in fact, his first personal contact with the suffering and sin
of the world, his first grapple with a social problem in the raw. Two
years before, when he had offered to write an article on this topic for
the Assistant Secretary of Charities, his interest in a reformatory had
been only the scientific interest which the trained sociologist feels in
all the enginery of social reform. But now this institution had become
indissolubly connected in Queed's mind with the case of Eva Bernheimer,
whom Buck Klinker knew, Eva Bernheimer who was "in trouble" at sixteen,
and had now "dropped out.
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