"Why should we expect them to open their hearts to us?" Miss Peters continued. "We don't open ours to strangers, do we?"
"That's quite true," admitted Barry. "Sometimes I wonder if it isn't impertinent we are when we thrust ourselves into a poor man's room. I doubt we should like him to thrust himself into ours."
"I think that is a most amusing suggestion of yours," Mrs. Jimmy declared. "I shall look forward with delight to the day when the Five Points send missionaries up to Fifth Avenue."
"What an absurd idea!" cried Mrs. Canton, in disgust.
"Come now," the Irishman returned, "I deny that the suggestion is mine; but it is not so absurd—really, it isn't. There's lots of things they can teach us. I don't know but what we have more to learn from them than they have from us—really I don't. Christianity, now—practical Christianity—'inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these,' and all that sort of thing—well, there's more of that among the poor than there is among the rich, I'm thinking."
"If you want to pick up picturesque bits of low life in New York," broke in De Ruyter, "you must get a chance to see a candle in the plate."
"A candle in the plate?" echoed Barry. "I've never heard of it."
"It sounds like the title of a tale of superstition transplanted from Europe and surviving here in America," said Mrs. Jimmy.
"It's not a superstition, it's only a custom," De Ruyter explained; "and whether it's a transplanted survival or not I can't say. You see I've never seen the thing myself, but I've been told about it. I hear that down in the tenement-house region, when a family can't pay the rent and the landlord puts their scant furniture out on the sidewalk, and they don't know where to lay their heads that night, then one of the neighbors takes a candle and lights it and sticks it up on a plate, and takes his stand on the sidewalk; and this is a sign to everybody that there is a family in sore distress, and so the passers-by drop in a penny or two until there is enough to pay the arrears of rent and let the poor mother and children go back."
Mrs. Jimmy Suydam laughed a little bitterly. "That sort of thing may be possible on Cherry Hill," she said, "but it would never do on Murray Hill, would it? Just imagine how absurd a broken millionaire would look standing at a street corner with a little electric light on a silver salver, expecting the multi-millionaires going by to drop in a check or two to pay his rent for him!"