more people were hungry from improvidence or lack of work, the more were
her daily visits a necessity; and though she was weary of her monotonous
work, and heart-sick at its small result in such a mass, there never
came a day when she could quit it. She made no reputation in her
profession by this course; perhaps she awoke little gratitude from those
she served, and certainly had not so much of their confidence as the
quacks who imposed upon them and took their money; and she was not
heartened much by hope of anything better in this world or any other;
and as for pay, if there was enough of that to clothe her decently, she
apparently did not spend it on herself.

It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should
simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not
even notoriety. Did she love these people? She did not ever say anything
about that. In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little clubs
for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure to
attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any religion
of humanity. Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of these
people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there was
nothing for her to do but to give herself to them. She would probably
have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this
following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic
bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition seemed to
her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization
towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so
pharisaical. If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind
run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social
organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass
of humanity is concerned.

One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in
Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl
of fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services.
He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though
small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers,
there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from
it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that
Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open