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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