IV

It was the next winter that she asked her first question.

“Mr. West,” she said, after making notes of this or that case that

needed looking after (for she was practically visitor for St. James

now),--“Mr. West, I would like to ask you something.”

“Do, my dear Mrs. Eaton,” he answered heartily.

“I would like to ask you,” she said, her eyes fixed on his, to lose

no shade of meaning in his reply, “do you think it would be right

for one person to live on money that another person had stolen?”

“If they knew it was stolen, of course not!” he said, smiling. “Has

a pickpocket offered to go halves with you?”

“No, sir,” she answered, so gravely that her listener’s eyes

twinkled. She made no explanation, but went away with a troubled

look. The next time she saw him she had another question:--

“But suppose the person who lived on the money the other person

stole needed it very much. Suppose they hadn’t anything else in the

world. Suppose their children hadn’t anything else. Would it be

their business to ask where it came from, Mr. West?”

“If it was their business to spend it, it would be,” he told her.

“Oh, my dear lady, the question of complicity is a pretty big one!”

He sighed, thinking how little she realized that she was guessing

at the riddle of the painful earth.

Again she went away, her face falling into lines of care. But

William West never thought of the matter again. Indeed, he had no

time to think of his quiet almoner; those were alarming days in

Mercer. The echoes of that storm which shook not only the town, but

the very State and nation, are still rolling and muttering in the

dark places of the land.

Another strike had begun in October. As for the deep and

far-reaching causes, the economic and industrial necessities, the

vast plans of organizations and trusts, they have no place in

this statement of the way in which one ignorant woman regarded

their effects--a woman living quietly in her brother’s house,

doing her work, expending her little charities, trying to relieve

the dreadful misery of those wintry days, with about as much

success as a child who plays beside some terrific torrent and

tries to dam it with his tiny bank of twigs and pebbles. Robert

Blair’s sister had no economic or ethical theories; she had only

an anguished heart at the suffering in that dreary mill town, a

dreadful bewilderment at its contrast with the untouched luxury

of her brother’s house. That she should find a child in one of

the tenements dying at its mother’s barren breast, while her own

children fared sumptuously every day; that a miserable man should

curse her because her brother was robbing him of work, and warmth,

and decency, even, while she must bless that same brother for

what he was giving her, was a dreadful puzzle. As she understood

the situation, this misery existed because her brother would no

longer give even fourteen cents an hour to human beings who had to

stand half naked in the scorch of intense furnaces, reeking with

sweat, taking a breathless moment to plunge waist deep into tanks

of cold water; to men who worked where the crash of exploding slag

or the accidental tipping of a ladle might mean death; to gaunt

and stunted creatures, hollow-eyed, with bleared and sodden faces,

whose incessant toil to keep alive had crushed out the look of

manhood, and left them silent, hopeless, brutish, with only one

certainty in their stupefied souls: “_men don’t grow old in the

mills_.” ... That these things should be, while she was clothed

in soft raiment bought by wealth which these desperate beings

had helped to create--meant to this ignorant woman that there

was something wrong somewhere. It was not for her to say what or

where. She had no ambition to reform the world. She did not protest

against the “unearned increment,” nor did she have views as to

“buying labor in the cheapest market.” She did not know anything

about such phrases. The only thing that concerned her was whether

she, living on her brother’s money, had any part or lot in the

suffering about her? She grew nervous and haggard and more distrait

and literal than ever. She wished she dared lay her troubles before

the wise, gentle, strong man who, to her, was all that was good and

great. But it did not seem to her right to criticise her brother

to his clergyman. She never realized how amusing her simplicity

might be, laid up against the enormous complexity of the industrial

question; to her it was only: “If Robert is rich, and doesn’t give

his workmen enough to live on, are not the children and I stealing

from the men in living on Robert’s money?”

This little question, applied to the relations of capital and

labor, is of course absurd; but she asked it all the same, this

soft, negative, biddable creature. She had gone to take some food

to a hungry household, and she went away burning with shame because

she was not hungry! It had been a cold, bright November day; she

went past one of the silent furnaces along the black cinder path to

the river-bank, where the flat cones of slag were dumped; some of

them were still slightly warm.

It was quiet enough here to think: After all, Robert’s money did

so much good; there was the great fountain in the square, and the

hospital, and the free night school. And think of what he was doing

for Essie and Silas! Oh, it surely wasn’t her business to ask why

he cut the men’s wages down!

There was a flare of sunset flushing the calm blue of the upper

heavens, and in the river, running black and silent before her, a

red glow smouldered and brightened. Behind her, and all along the

opposite bank, the furnaces were still. Oh, the misery of that

black stillness! If only she could see again the monstrous sheets

of flame, orange, and azure, bursting with a roar of sparks from

under the dampers of the great chimneys. It would mean work and

warmth and food to so many! By some unsuggested flash of memory the

parsonage garden came swiftly to her mind. It must be lying chill

in the wintry sunset; she could see the little house behind it,

with its bare, clean poverty; she wished she were back in it again

with the two children! The beauty and the luxury of her brother’s

house seemed suffocating and intolerable; and yet would it feed the

strikers if she should starve?--the vision of her own destitution

without her brother’s money was appalling. She sat down on a piece

of slag, a little faint at the thought. Just then, from down below

her, on the great heap of refuse, she heard voices.

“Come farther up; they’re hotter higher up,” a woman said shrilly.

Then a miserable little group came clambering over the great cones

of cooling slag, and a child cried out joyously, “This here one’s

hot, mammy!”

The woman, catching sight of Robert Blair’s sister, though not

recognizing her, said harshly:--

“You bet hangman Blair has a fire in his house to-day. Well, thank

God, he ain’t made no cut in slag, yet; we can get a bit of warmth

here. I wish he may freeze in his bed!”

Lydia Eaton answered, stammering and incoherent, something about

the cold weather; and then, she was so overstrained and nervous,

she burst out crying. “Oh, won’t you please let me give you this?”

she said, and put some money into the woman’s hand.

She went away, stumbling, because her eyes were blurred with tears,

and saying to herself,--

“What _shall_ I do?”

She almost ran into Mr. West on Baker Street, and stopped abruptly,

putting her hands on his arm, and, in her agitation, shaking it

violently, her whole face convulsed and terrified.

“Tell me--you know; you are good: whose fault is it? Robert’s--for

all--this?”

He understood instantly, and was very gentle with her.

“My dear Mrs. Eaton, that is a very big question. It isn’t any one

man’s fault. It seems strange, but the weather in India may be

the reason we are all so wretched in Mercer. Your brother may be

forced to make this cut by great laws, which, perhaps, you cannot

understand.”

“But _we_ go on being warm,” she said, “and it is cold. Oh, those

little children had to get warm on the slag! Oh, sir, I don’t

believe the Saviour would have been warm while the children were

cold!”

She looked at him passionately, abruptly applying the precepts of

the Founder of his religion.

“Ah, well, you know,” William West said kindly, “this whole matter

is so enormously complicated”--And then he stammered a little, for,

after all, how could he explain to this poor little frightened,

ignorant soul that we have learned how injurious to the race would

be the literal application of the logic of the Sermon on the Mount?

Nowadays the disciple is wiser than his master, and the servant

more prudent than his Lord; we know that to feed the five thousand

with loaves and fishes, without receiving some equivalent, would be

to pauperize them. But of course Mrs. Eaton could not be made to

understand that. The clergyman quieted her, somehow; perhaps just

by his gentle pitifulness; or else her reverence for him silenced

her. She did not ask him any more questions; and there was no one

else to ask, except her brother, and just now it would have been

hard to find the chance to ask Robert Blair anything.

The strike had slowly involved all the mills owned by a syndicate

of which he was chairman. He had to go to South Bend, where the

great smelting furnaces are; he was mobbed there, though with no

worse results than the unpleasantness of eggs and cabbage stalks;

still, the wickedness of those dreadful creatures was something

too awful, Mrs. Blair said, crying with anger and fright over the

newspaper account. At still another mill town a ghastly box reached

him, labeled: “Starved by the Blair syndicate.” Robert Blair paled

and sickened at its contents, but he swore under his breath: “Let

them starve their brats, if they want to; it isn’t my business.

There’s work for them if they want it; but the curs would rather

loaf. This country can go to the devil before I’ll give in to them!”

He did not get back to Mercer until December. “I wouldn’t let the

fools keep me from you on Christmas,” he told his wife savagely,

and caught her in his arms with a sort of rage. “Were you very

lonely? You’ve been nervous--I can see it in your face. You are

paler!” He ground his teeth; that those brutes should have made her

paler!

“Of course I was lonely,” she said, smiling, though her eyes were

bright with tears, “and I’ve been frightened almost to death about

you, too. Oh, that mob!”

“You little goose; didn’t I tell you there was no danger? I

always had two detectives. But I used to get anxious about you. I

telegraphed the mayor to detail an officer to be always about the

house. Heaven knows what’s going to be the end of this business,

Nell! Well, sweetheart, may I have some dinner, or must I go and

dress first?”

“No. You’re dreadfully dusty, but I can’t lose sight of you for a

moment,” she said gayly. “Robert, I should have died if you hadn’t

been at home for Christmas!”

His sister and the children met him at the dining-room door--Silas,

capering about with delight; Esther, prettier than ever, coming to

hang on his arm, and rub her cheek against his shoulder, and say

how glad she was to see him.

“Robert, it’s perfectly disgusting,” Mrs. Blair complained, “but a

delegation insists upon seeing you to-night; they are coming about

eight.”

“Oh, confound it!” he said frowning; “the strike, of course? A lot

of parsons meddling with what they know nothing about.”

“There are parsons, I suppose,” she said, “but the mayor is coming.

Do get rid of them as soon as you can, so that I may have a little

of you.”

She looked so pretty as she sat at the head of her table,

beseeching him, that he declared he would kick the delegation out

if they stayed over ten minutes; then he tossed a small white

velvet box across the roses in the big silver bowl in the middle of

the table, and watched her flash of joy as she opened it.

“It seems to me I have some more boxes, somewhere,” he said

good-humoredly. “There, Essie! if your aunt Eleanor had packed me

off to get into my dress-suit, I wouldn’t have found this one in my

pocket. Lydia, you sober old lady, can you wear that? As for you,

Silas, you don’t want any gewgaws, do you? We fellows think more of

a bit of paper with three figures on it, hey?”

“There! there’s the bell. It’s your horrid delegation,” Mrs. Blair

cried. “Just let them wait till you finish dinner. And do get rid

of them quickly. Mr. Hudson, Lydia’s minister, will be there; tell

him to wait a minute when the others have gone. I want to speak to

him.”

“I thought little Hudson had more sense,” Robert Blair grumbled,

rising and going into the library to meet a dozen of his

fellow-citizens, some of them men with grave and startled faces,

who from pity for the three thousand fools who were turning Mercer

upside down, and from good-humored interest in the affairs of their

powerful townsman, were beginning to feel the sting of personal

alarm about their own concerns.

These men were saying to each other what the newspapers had been

saying for two months, that Robert Blair, for vanity or obstinacy

or greed, was bringing alarming disaster not merely upon a few

thousand desperate and hungry and unreasonable puddlers, but upon

the respectable well-to-do business population of his city.

“And he’s got to stop it!” the mayor said angrily.

“It would be a good job if somebody would blow him up with

dynamite,” said the Baptist deacon, who was the wealthiest

merchant in town. “He’ll swamp us all, if we don’t look out.”

As for the clergyman, he looked very miserable, for he had the

expenses of his church and his own salary in mind, and between

offending Mr. Blair and not protesting against the continuance of

the strike, the poor little man was between the devil and the deep

sea.

“Gentlemen,” said Robert Blair, calm and hard (“as nails,” the

Baptist deacon said), “I appreciate the honor of your call, and I

hope I have listened with proper courtesy and patience to what you

had to say; but allow me to call your attention to certain facts

which seem to contradict your assertions that you suspect that I

am not acting for the public good in this matter of the strike.

Mr. Mayor, if my wealth had been gained by the subversion of law

and order, as you suggest, I am sure you could not have accepted

any of it for your campaign--ah--_expenses_. For you, Mr. Davis, a

church member, a deacon, if I mistake not, I need only remind you

of your willingness to borrow, I will not say how many thousands,

as the basis of your most successful business (though I would not

be thought to underrate your own prudence and economy in paying

your women clerks a little less than they can live on). And as

for my worthy friend here, the Rev. Mr. Hudson, if my money were,

as he has so delicately implied, ‘blood-money,’ I cannot think he

would have accepted the contribution I had the privilege of making

towards the alterations of his church. Gentlemen, you have felt

it your duty to remonstrate with me upon my way of making money;

so long as you are content to spend that money, I cannot believe

that your remonstrances are based upon anything else than the

inconvenience to yourselves of certain exigencies which I deeply

regret, but which result from methods which commend themselves to

me, and which, I observe, you apply in your own concerns: you all

pay as little as you can for what you want; I pay as little as I

can for labor. For your particular request that I submit to the

demands of the strikers, I can only say that when Mr. Davis will

give away in charity the fortune built upon the outcome of those

methods; when his honor the Mayor will refund the--ah--_expenses_

of his recent successful campaign and call it conscience-money;

when the Rev. Mr. Hudson will give up improving his church--in

fact, when you will all consent to buy your shirts or your potatoes

in the dearest market--I will consent to alter the methods whereby

I have had the honor of serving you. We will all reduce together.

When we can do that, I will recognize a moral issue, as Mr. Hudson

so admirably expresses it. Until then I will try to mind my own

business. If it were not perhaps discourteous, I would recommend

a like course of action to this committee. Gentlemen, I bid you

good-evening.”

He was pale with rage. He forgot his wife’s message to the

minister; he bowed, and stood with folded arms watching the

withdrawal of the humiliated and angry delegation, “with their

tails between their legs,” the little clergyman said to himself,

stung by the impudent injustice of it all.

Mr. Blair went into the drawing-room, breathing hard with the

restraint he had put upon himself, for his coldly insolent words

had been no outlet to his anger. “Don’t talk about it,” he said

violently. “I won’t hear another word on the subject. Nell, I

thought that little Hudson was not entirely a jackass, though he is

a parson; he had the impertinence to say that ‘Brother West’ agreed

with him. I don’t believe it! But if it’s true, why, then, West is

a meddling idiot, like all the rest of these damned self-seeking

philanthropists.”

“Robert, _dear_! the children,” murmured Mrs. Blair nervously.

His face was dully red, and his blue, fierce eyes cut like knives;

one felt an unspoken epithet applied to the children, who watched

him furtively, with frightened glances, and moved about awkwardly,

speaking to each other in undertones. A moment before, everything

had been full of charm and graciousness; their pretty aunt sat,

indolent and graceful, on a yellow sofa, leaning back against some

ivory-satin cushions, with a great yellow-shaded lamp shining down

on her delicate dark beauty; the flicker of the fire behind the

sparkling brass dogs went leaping softly about the room, glowing

on the walls, which were covered above the white wainscoting with

yellow damask, on which the candle-light from the high sconces fell

with a yellow shine; everything was golden and bright and rich, and

the warm still air was delicate with the scent of violets. Then

into it burst this violent and angry presence.

There is no embarrassment quite like the embarrassment of listening

to a person for whom one has a regard making a fool of himself.

Nobody spoke. Robert Blair tramped up and down, kicked a little

gilded stool half across the room, caught his foot in a rug,

stumbled, and then swore. Mrs. Blair’s fox-terrier, Pat, shrunk

under a table and looked at him, trembling.

“Silas,” said Mrs. Eaton, “you and Esther must go upstairs.”

“The trouble is,” said her brother to his wife, “these men don’t

know what they are talking about; they don’t know anything about

the market; they don’t know anything about the necessities of

trade; all they know is their dividends; if _they_ were cut,

there’d be a howl! But they presume to dictate to us; to tell us

the money is blood-money; all the same, they are ready enough to

spend it on their own carcasses!”

Mrs. Eaton had closed the door on her children, and came and stood

by a little silver-cluttered table, under the big yellow lamp. “I

think Robert is quite right,” she said.

The approval of this mild creature was like an edge laid against

the tense thread of Robert Blair’s anger. He burst into a laugh.

“Bless your heart, Lydia, I didn’t know you were in the room. Well,

my dear, I’m glad you approve of me.”

“I don’t, brother.”

“Oh, you don’t? Where are the chicks? Sent them out of the room

because I used bad words? Well, I oughtn’t to swear in the

drawing-room, that’s a fact. _Place aux Dames!_ But after all, I

only dropped the ‘_place_.’”

“Oh!” his wife said; and then, “you are very naughty;” and pouted,

and pulled him down on his knees beside her.

“I thought it was very natural to be angry at the rug,” Mrs. Eaton

said breathlessly; “I’ve often felt like speaking that way myself”--

“Do, Lydia, do!” Mr. Blair interrupted, with a laugh.

“--but Mr. Eaton would never have allowed the children to hear,

and”--

“Come, now! Haven’t I apologized? Don’t rub it in. I’ll give you

something extra to put in the plate on Sunday, because I did pitch

into your man Hudson like the devil! I told him so long as he spent

‘blood-money’ for his darned improvements, he couldn’t reproach me

for earning it.”

“Oh,” Lydia Eaton said, her hands squeezed together,--“oh, no!

He is quite different from--me. It is _you_ who are spending

the--blood-money on the improvements. If he were spending it on

himself, like--like me, it would be different.”

Her brother looked up at her from his footstool at his wife’s feet,

first amused, and then bored.

“My dear Lily, I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about.

I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes about your parson. He means

well. Only he is a parson, so I suppose he can’t help being rather

ladylike in business matters. Do drop the subject; I am sick of the

whole thing. How is your conservatory, Nell? Are those violets the

result of your agricultural efforts?”

“I think, Robert,” his sister said in her low voice, that shivered

and broke, “I must just say one thing more: I must give you back

this beautiful thing you gave me at dinner. And I must go away with

the children.”

“What under the sun!” he began, frowning; then he got up and stood

on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire. “Lydia, I hope you are

not going to be a fool? What are you talking about? Sit down,--sit

down! You’re as white as a ghost. Lily, I’m afraid you’re a great

goose. What’s the matter?” He could not help softening as he looked

at her. She stood there by the little tottering table, loaded with

its dozens of foolish bits of silver, so tense and quivering that

even his impatient eyes could not fail to see her agitation.

“Robert, you have been so kind to us; you are so good to us,--oh, I

don’t know how I can do it!” she broke into an anguished sob,--“but

I must. Mr. Eaton would never have let the children be supported on

money that was not--that was not good.”

There was silence; the clock in the hall chimed ten. Then Eleanor

Blair, sitting up, pale and angry, said,--

“Well, upon my word!”

Her husband looked at his sister with sudden kindness in his

eyes. “Lily, you don’t understand. When I said what I did to Mr.

Hudson,--of course, that has put it into your head,--I didn’t

really mean it. In the first place, I’m an honest man (I’ll just

mention that in passing), and it is not your business nor his

to judge my business methods. It isn’t a pretty thing to look a

gift-horse in the mouth, Lil.”

“It isn’t what you said to Mr. Hudson,” she answered. “I’ve been

thinking about it for nearly a year. Robert, you pay them so

little, and I--I have all this.”

She looked about the beautiful room with a sort of fright: it

seemed to her that the warm and stately walls hid human misery

lying close outside,--hunger and hatred, cold and sickness, and the

terror of to-morrow. The impudent luxury of this enormous wealth

struck her like a blow on the mouth.

“They,” she said, with a sob, “_are hungry_.”

Her brother, divided between irritation and amusement, was touched

in spite of himself.

“My dear Lily,” he said, “you can’t understand this thing. To put

it vulgarly, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Look here,

the men can go to work to-morrow if they want to; but they don’t

want to. I offer them work, and they can take it or leave it.

Well, they leave it. It’s their affair, not mine.”

But she shook her head miserably. “I don’t understand it. If you

were poor, too, it would be different.”

“Well, really!” said Mrs. Blair.

But Robert Blair was wonderfully patient.

“There’s another thing you must remember, Lily; these people are

far better off on what I am willing to pay them than they were in

Europe, where most of them came from.”

“But, Robert,” she said passionately, “because they could be worse

off doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t be better off.

And--_it isn’t kind_.”

“Kind?” Her brother looked at her blankly, and then, with a shout

of laughter, “Lydia, you are as good as a play! No, my dear; I

don’t run my mills for kindness.”

“But,” she said, almost in a whisper, “whatsoever ye would that men

should do unto you”--

Mrs. Blair made a gesture of disgust.

“--oh, brother, I didn’t mean to find fault with you. Only with

myself. I--I haven’t any right to spend money that I--don’t know

about.”

“Well, anything more?” Robert Blair said, a little tired of her

foolishness. “My dear, like the parson, you mean well; but you are

a great goose!”

As for his wife, she did not even answer Mrs. Eaton’s tremulous

“good-night.”

V

The husband and wife looked at each other; then Robert Blair flung

his head back with a laugh.

“She is perfectly delicious!”

“She is perfectly ungrateful, and I believe she means it.”

“Oh, nonsense! Lil hasn’t mind enough to mean anything; and I’ll

tell you another thing: in spite of her quiet ways, she really has

a good deal of worldly wisdom. She knows what it is to those two

children to have me interested in them. Don’t worry your little

head”--

“Oh, I don’t worry,” she answered. “If she is going to presume to

criticise you, I don’t want her under my roof; the sooner she

leaves the better!”

“Spitfire!” he told her, kissing her pretty hand, and forgetting

all about his sister’s absurdity, and the strike, and the men and

women shivering in the tenements down in the miserable mill town.

But he remembered it all the next morning at the breakfast-table,

for Lydia Eaton’s white face was too striking to escape comment.

Mrs. Blair was not present, preferring to be, at what she called

the “brutal hour of eight,” in her own room, with a tray and her

maid and a novel.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Blair said kindly. “Are you ill, Lily?”

“It’s what I told you last night, Robert,” she said nervously.

The solemn Samuel, all ears, but looking perfectly deaf, brought

a dish to his master’s elbow. Robert Blair closed his lips with a

snap. Then he said,--

“Please make no reference to that folly before Eleanor.”

But of course it was only a respite. The folly had to be repeated

to Eleanor--discussed, argued, denounced, until the whole

atmosphere of the house was charged with excitement.

Through it all Lydia Eaton came and went, and did her packing.

“Well,” her sister-in-law said contemptuously, “perhaps you’ll tell

me how you mean to _feed_ Esther and Silas? You have a right to

starve yourself, but I have some feeling for the children!”

“I am going to work,” the other answered, trembling.

“Lydia,” Mrs. Blair said passionately, “next to your ingratitude

to your brother, I must say your selfishness in ruining your own

children is the most dreadful thing I ever heard of!”

But Mrs. Eaton’s preparations went on. Not that there was so much

to do; but she had to find rooms, and then she had to find work. It

was the latter exigency which fanned Robert Blair’s contemptuous

annoyance, which refused to take the matter seriously, into sudden

flames of rage, for his sister saw fit to apply at a shop for the

position of saleswoman. Of course it came to his ears, and that

night the storm burst on Mrs. Eaton’s head. As for Robert Blair,

when the interview was over, during which he spared Mrs. Eaton no

detail of his furious mortification, he said savagely to his wife:

“I wish you’d go and see if West cannot bring her to her senses.

Get him to influence her to some decency. Tell him, if she’s set in

this outrageous ingratitude, I wish he would persuade her to let me

send her East, to some other place, and let her work (and starve!)

where she won’t disgrace me. Think of it, Eleanor--that man Davis

coming whining and grinning, and saying he ‘would do what he could

to give my sister a position as saleslady, but I knew the times

were bad’! Damn him!”

“Good heavens, Robert! You don’t mean to say she’s been to Davis’s?

My dear, she is insane! Yes, I’ll go and see Mr. West to-morrow.”

She went. It was a raw, bleak morning; the thin, chill winter

rain blurred the windows of her brougham, and the mud splashed up

against the glass; the wheels sunk into deep ruts of the badly

paved streets, and the uncomfortable jolt and sway of the softly

padded carriage added to her indignation at her sister-in-law.

William West did not live in the new part of Mercer, with its

somewhat gorgeous houses; nor yet in the old part, which was

charming and dignified, and inclined to despise everything not

itself; but in the middle section, near the rows of rotten and

tumbling tenements, and within a stone’s throw of bleak and hideous

brick blocks, known as “Company boarding-houses.” He had come here

to live shortly after a certain crash in his own life; a personal

blow, which left him harder, and more silent, and more earnest. He

had been jilted, people said, and wondered why, for a while, and

then forgot it, as he, absorbed in his work, seemed also to forget

it.

Mrs. Blair, her fox-terrier under one arm, stepped out of the

carriage, frowning to find herself in this squalid street; but

once inside the big, plain, comfortable house where William West

lived all by himself, her face relaxed and took a certain arch and

charming discontent; there was a big fire blazing in the minister’s

library, and the dignity and refinement of the room, the smell

of leather-covered books, the gleam of pictures and bronzes, and

a charming bit of tapestry hanging on the chimney-piece restored

her sense of mental as well as physical comfort. When he entered,

and dragged a big chair in front of the fire for her, and looked

at her with that grave attention which seems like homage, and was

part of the man, being called forth by his washerwoman as well as

by Mrs. Robert Blair, she felt almost happy again, and assured that

everything would come out right.

“Mr. West,” she began, “you’ve got to help us; we’re in such absurd

difficulties! Will you?”

“Command me,” he said, smiling.

“You haven’t heard, then? It’s Lydia--Mr. Blair’s sister, you know.

She has taken it into her head that”--the color came into Mrs.

Blair’s face--“that she won’t let Robert support her, because she

thinks he isn’t treating the strikers properly. I’m sure I don’t

know what idea she has! But she won’t accept his money. Did you

ever hear of such a thing?”

William West’s face sobered instantly. “I have not seen Mrs. Eaton

for a fortnight,” he said; “I had no idea”--He got up, frowning,

the lines about his lips perplexed and anxious.

“I’m sure,” the pretty woman went on, growing angrier as she

spoke, “I don’t care what _she_ does,--I’ve lost all patience

with her,--but to throw the children’s future away! And it’s

so embarrassing for Robert.” Then she told him fully the whole

situation. “She keeps saying,” Mrs. Blair ended, “that ‘Mr. Eaton’

wouldn’t have allowed the children to be supported on money that

‘_wasn’t good_.’ Did you ever hear such impertinence?”

“Ah, well,” he protested good-naturedly, “I’m sure Mrs. Eaton does

not mean to be impertinent; and I’m sure she does appreciate her

brother’s kindness. Only, she is trying to work out a great problem

on an individual basis, which is of course very foolish. But the

dear little lady must not be allowed--And yet”--He paused, frowning

and perplexed.

“Ah, but, Mr. West, when she has the assurance to quote the Bible

to her own brother--it seems to me that’s rather impertinent?

Fancy! something about ‘doing unto others’--and ‘being partaker’ if

she spent the money that had been ‘wrung from the strikers.’ Upon

my word! ‘Wrung!’ As I said to my husband, ‘Upon my word, I never

heard of such a thing.’”

“Neither did I,” William West said dryly. “We are all of us in the

habit of taking our dividends, and not looking at the way they are

earned. Mrs. Eaton is certainly unusual.”

“Well, do you think you can influence her?” Mrs. Blair insisted. “I

don’t mean to stay with us; I don’t think that would be possible or

desirable now. But to let Mr. Blair give her an allowance, so that

she can take care of the children. It is positively wicked to think

how she is ruining the children!”

“Won’t she take any money from your husband?”

“Not a cent, if you please! Not a penny. She keeps saying that if

she can’t feel that the source of the money is all right, she can’t

spend it.” Mrs. Blair cuffed her dog prettily with her muff, and

kissed his little sleek head. “Isn’t she a goose, Pat, you darling?”

“Her principle would turn the world upside down,” the clergyman

said.

“That’s just what I say!” cried Mrs. Blair.

“If we all said we would have nothing to do with the ‘blood of

the just person,’ what would become of the railroads and the

coal-mines and the oil trusts? What would become of our dividends

from industrial stocks if we insisted on knowing that the workmen

were honestly paid? How could we eat meat, if we looked into the

slaughter-house?”

Mrs. Blair looked puzzled.

“And she is going to work for her living?” He was profoundly

moved. “Good heavens, out of the mouths of babes! What a primitive

expression of social responsibility! But surely, Mrs. Blair, we

must respect her honesty? As for her judgment, that’s another

matter.”

Eleanor Blair’s blank astonishment left her speechless for a

moment; then she flung up her head haughtily.

“Mr. West, do you mean to say”--she began.

“My dear Mrs. Blair,” he said quietly, “I mean to say that little

Mrs. Eaton, in her simple way, puts her finger right on the centre

of this whole miserable question, in which, directly or indirectly,

we are all involved: she has recognized our complicity. Of course

she is going to work the wrong way--at least, I suppose she is. God

knows! But what courage,--what directness!”

“Do I understand,” Eleanor Blair said, rising, “that you approve of

my sister-in-law’s extraordinary conduct?”

“I approve of _her_,” he said, smiling. “If you ask me whether I

think she is doing right, I should say ‘Yes,’ because she is acting

upon her conscience. Is she doing wisely? No; because civilization

is compromise. We have either got to bow in the House of Rimmon,

or go and live in the woods like Thoreau and eat dried peas. I’ll

tell her so, if you want me to. But as for attempting to influence

her, I cannot do that. The place whereon we stand is holy ground.”

Mrs. Blair picked up her dog and set her teeth; then she looked

slightly beyond the clergyman, with half-shut eyes, and said,--

“Will you be good enough to have my carriage called?”