Sound of Running Feet

The story is placed in a small real estate firm, which has barely kept its head honorably above the flood of the depression. To the employees the brothers who head the firm are Bloated Capitalism. To themselves they are two harried, middle-aged men with financial burdens all but too heavy to bear. Two or three of the office force have been in their jobs twenty years or more. Two or three of them are young, new to the firm, new to any jobs, batting their poor impassioned young heads agains the horrid solidity of the vererable fact that there are not, in this or any other world, enough jobs and money to go around....

Miss Lawrence plainly believes that the cancer of shoddiness is eating America, that the lack of ideals, goals, education, and guts is what makes the lack of money the evil thing it is. She is not comforting. But she does not sneer. "The Sound of Running Feet" is compassionate and hopeless.

Saturday Review of Literature, 9 January 1937


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