w think of this poor man. He had
a clerkship in a mill, and received a salary of disgraceful smallness;
he never knew what it was to be free of anxiety. The laws of political
economy will have it so, says my husband; if Mr. Hood refused, there
were fifty other men ready to take the place. He couldn't have lived at
all, it seems, but that he owned a house in another town, which brought
him a few pounds a year. I can't talk of such things with patience.
Here's my husband offering himself as a Liberal candidate for Dunfield
at the election coming on. I say to him: What are you going to do if you
get into Parliament? Are you going to talk political economy, and make
believe that everything is right, when it's as wrong as can be? If so, I
say, you'd better save your money for other purposes, and stay where you
are. He tells me my views are impracticable; then, I say, so much the
worse for the world, and so much the more shame for every rich man who
finds excuses for such a state of things. It is dreadful to think of
what those poor people must have gone through. They were so perfectly
quiet under it that no one gave a thought to their position. When Emily
used to come here day after day, I've often suspected she didn't have
enough to eat, yet it was impossible for me to ask questions, it would
have been called prying into things that didn't concern me.'

'She has told me for how much kindness she is indebted to you,' Wilfrid
said, with gratitude.

'Pooh! What could I do? Oh, don't we live absurdly artificial lives? Now
why should a family who, through no fault of their own, are in the most
wretched straits, shut themselves up and hide it like a disgrace? Don't
you think we hold a great many very nonsensical ideas about self-respect
and independence and so on? If I were in want, I know two or three
people to whom I should forthwith go and ask for succour; if they
thought the worse of me for it, I should tell them they ought to be
ashamed of themselves. We act, indeed, as if we ourselves had made the
world and were bound to pretend it an admirable piece of work, without a
screw loose anywhere. I always say the world's about as bad a place as
one could well imagine, at all events for most people who live in it,
and that it's our plain duty to help each other without grimacings. The
death of this poor man has distressed me more than I can tell you; it
does seem such a monstrously cruel thing. There's his employer, a man
called