t I
would call delicately."

"Your charities are like waving a scented handkerchief over the
stock-yards. Or like handing out after-dinner mints to a mob of
starving men."

"You're quite the wrong end there--as is usual with you agitators," he
replied comfortably. "We don't give them mints. We give them soup."

"_Giving_ them soup--even if you did--is the mint end. Why don't you give
them jobs?"

He spread out his hands in gesture of despair. "What a bore a little
learning can make of one! My dear niece, I deeply regret to be compelled
to inform you that there aren't 'jobs' enough to go around."

"Why aren't there?"

"Why the obvious reason would seem, Katie," he replied patiently, "that
there are too many of them wanting them."

"And as usual, the obvious reason is not it. There are too many of you
and me--that's the trouble. They don't have the soup because they must
furnish us the mints." It was Katie who had risen now and was walking
about the room. Her cheeks were blazing. "I tell you, uncle, I feel it's
a disgrace the way we live--taking everything and doing nothing. I feel
positively cheap about it. The army and the church and all the other
useless things--"

"I do not agree with you that the army is useless and I certainly cannot
permit you to say the church is."

"You'll not be able to stop other people from saying it!"

He seemed about to make heated reply, but instead sank back with an
amused smile. "Katie, your learning sounds very suspiciously as though
it were put on last night. I feel like putting up a sign--'Fresh
Paint--Keep Off.'"

"Well at any rate it's not mouldy!"

"At college I roomed with a chap who had a way of discovering things,
getting in a fine glow of discovery over things everybody else had known.
He would wake me out of a sound sleep to tell me something I had heard
the week before."

"And it's trying to be waked out of a sound sleep, isn't it, uncle?" she
flashed back at him.

It ended with his kindly assuring her that he was glad she had begun to
think about the problems of the world; that no one knew better than he
that there was a social problem--and a grave one; that men of the church
had written some excellent things on the subject--he would send her some
of them. Indeed, he would be glad to do all in his power to help her to
a better understanding of things. He was convinced, he said soothingly,
that when she had gone a little farther into them she would see them