Her visit to the Girls' Club had first brought her in contact with the dramatic contrasts of life.

She had always accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity.

The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers.

All this was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.
But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments.
Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass.

That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions from pain--that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love--this discovery gave Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life.