worse.'

'Well, there is nothing like that in New York or Washington.'

'Do not be too sure. There is something like that wherever rich men are
congregated in large numbers to live.'

'Rich men!' cried Betty.

'Yes. So far as I know, this sort of thing is to be found nowhere else,
but where rich men dwell. It is the growth of their desire for large
incomes. That woman we visited--what did you think of her?'

'She impressed me very much, and oddly. I could not quite read her
look. She seemed to be in a manner hostile, not to you, but I thought
to all the world beside; a disagreeable look!'

'She is a lace-mender'--

'A lace-mender!' broke in Betty. 'Down in that den of darkness?'

'And she pays-- Did you see where she lived?'

'I saw a room not bigger than a good-sized box; is that all?'

'There is an inner room--or box--without windows, where she and her
child sleep. For that lodging that woman pays half-a-crown a week--that
is, about five shillings American money--to one of the richest noblemen
in England.'

'A nobleman!' cried Betty.

'The Duke of Trefoil.'

'A nobleman!' Betty repeated. 'A duke, and a lace-mender, and five
shillings a week!'

'The glass roofs of his hothouses and greenhouses would cover an acre
of ground. His wife sits in a boudoir opening into a conservatory where
it is summer all the year round; roses bloom and violets, and geraniums
wreathe the walls, and palm trees are grouped around fountains. She
eats ripe strawberries every day in the year if she chooses, and might,
like Judah, "wash her feet in the blood of the grape," the fruit is so
plenty, the while my lace-mender strains her eyes to get half-a-crown a
week for his Grace. All that alley and its poor crowded lodgings belong
to him.'

'I don't wonder she looks bitter, poor thing. Do you suppose she knows
how her landlord lives?'

'I doubt if she does. She perhaps never heard of the house and gardens
at Trefoil Park. But in her youth she was a servant in a good house in
the country,--not so great a house,--and she knows something of the
difference between the way the rich live and the poor. She is very
bitter over the contrast, and I cannot much blame her!'

'Yet it is not just.'

'Which?' said Pitt, smiling.

'That feeling of the poor towards the rich.'

'Is it not? It has some justice. I was coming home one night last
winter, late, and found my way obstructed by the crowd of arrivals to
an entertainment given at a