ion of the rich to the
poor. What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms! If
there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you
say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and
misery and physical wretchedness? You know what it is, and you know the
luxury elsewhere. And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes
with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors
and little aid societies--little palliatives for an awful state of
things. Why, look at it! Last winter the city authorities hauled off the
snow and the refuse from the fashionable avenues, and dumped it down in
the already blockaded and filthy side streets, and left us to struggle
with the increased pneumonia and diphtheria, and general unsanitary
conditions. And you wonder that the little nihilist groups and labor
organizations and associations of agnostics, as you call them, meeting
to study political economy and philosophy, say that the existing state
of things has got to be overturned violently, if those who have the
power and the money continue indifferent."

"I do not wonder," replied Father Damon, sadly. "The world is evil, and
I should be as despairing as you are if I did not know there was another
life and another world. I couldn't bear it. Nobody could."

"And all you've got to offer, then, to this mass of wretchedness,
poverty, ignorance, at close quarters with hunger and disease, is to
grin and bear it, in hope of a reward somewhere else!"

"I think you don't quite--"

The doctor looked up and saw a look of pain on the priest's face.

"Oh," she hastened to say, almost as impetuously as she had spoken
before, "I don't mean you--I don't mean you. I know what you do. Pardon
me for speaking so. I get so discouraged sometimes." They stood still a
moment, looking up and down the hot, crowded, odorful street they were
in, with its flaunting rags of poverty and inefficiency. "I see so
little result of what I can do, and there is so little help."

"I know," said the father, as they moved along. "I don't see how you can
bear it alone."

This touched a sore spot, and aroused Ruth Leigh's combativeness. It
seemed to her to approach the verge of cant again. But she knew the
father's absolute sincerity; she felt she had already said too much; and
she only murmured, as if to herself, "If we could only know." And
then, after a moment, she asked, "Do you, Father Damon, see any