he knows that he spends many
more hours in the public library reading good books than the average
workman has time to do. He has formed no bad habits and has yielded only
to those subtle temptations toward a life of leisure which come to the
intellectual man. He lacks the qualifications which would induce his
union to engage him as a secretary or organizer, but he is a constant
speaker at workingmen's meetings, and takes a high moral attitude on the
questions discussed there. He contributes a certain intellectuality to
his friends, and he has undoubted social value. The neighboring women
confide to the charity visitor their sympathy with his wife, because
she has to work so hard, and because her husband does not "provide."
Their remarks are sharpened by a certain resentment toward the
superiority of the husband's education and gentle manners. The charity
visitor is ashamed to take this point of view, for she knows that it is
not altogether fair. She is reminded of a college friend of hers, who
told her that she was not going to allow her literary husband to write
unworthy potboilers for the sake of earning a living. "I insist that we
shall live within my own income; that he shall not publish until he is
ready, and can give his genuine message." The charity visitor recalls
what she has heard of another acquaintance, who urged her husband to
decline a lucrative position as a railroad attorney, because she wished
him to be free to take municipal positions, and handle public questions
without the inevitable suspicion which unaccountably attaches itself in
a corrupt city to a corporation attorney. The action of these two women
seemed noble to her, but in their cases they merely lived on a lesser
income. In the case of the workingman's wife, she faced living on no
income at all, or on the precarious one which she might be able to get
together.

She sees that this third woman has made the greatest sacrifice, and she
is utterly unwilling to condemn her while praising the friends of her
own social position. She realizes, of course, that the situation is
changed by the fact that the third family needs charity, while the other
two do not; but, after all, they have not asked for it, and their plight
was only discovered through an accident to one of the children. The
charity visitor has been taught that her mission is to preserve the
finest traits to be found in her visited family, and she shrinks from
the thought of convincing the