They soon reached the tenement where Tony lived, and Carmen asked the priest to go up with her. He raised a hand and smiled.
“No,” he said, “the good woman doesn’t like priests. And my labors don’t reach the women anyway, except through the men. They constitute my field. Some one else must work among the women. I’ll wait for you here.”
It was only by making many promises that Carmen could at last get away from the little group on the fourth floor. But she slipped a bill into Tony’s hands as she went out, and then hurriedly crossed the hall and opened the unlocked door of the widow Marcus’s room. The place was empty. Carmen pinned a five-dollar bill upon the pillow and hastened out.
“Now,” said the priest, when the girl had joined him in the street below, “it ain’t right to take you to the Mission––”
“We’ll go there first,” the girl calmly announced. “And then to the Hall. By the way, there’s a telephone in your place? I want to call up the health officer. I want to report the condition of these tenements.”
The priest laughed. “It won’t do any good, Miss. I’ve camped on his heels for months. And he can’t do anything, anyway. I see that. If he gets too troublesome to those higher up, why, he gets fired. They don’t want his reports. He isn’t here to report on conditions, but to overlook ’em. It’s politics.”
“You mean to say that nothing can be done in regard to those awful buildings which Mr. Ames owns and rents to his mill hands?” she said.
“That’s it,” he replied. “It’s criminal to let such buildings stand. But Ames owns ’em. That’s enough.”
They went on in silence for some minutes. Meanwhile, the priest was studying his fair companion, and wondering who she might be. At length he inquired if she had ever been in Avon before.