“I am hardly a tragedy,” interrupted Emily. “Please don’t make me out one of those comical creatures who go through life fancying themselves heroines of melodrama.”
“I don’t. You are supremely natural and sensible. But—I neither know nor try to guess nor care how you came to be the woman you are. But I do know that you are one of those to whom all experience is a help toward becoming wiser and stronger and better.”
It seemed to her as if, in spite of her struggles, she was being drawn toward him irresistibly, toward a fate which at once fascinated and frightened her. “You are dangerously interesting,” she said. “But I am staying too long.” And with a few words of thanks for his assistance to her work, she went away.
In the street she rapidly recovered herself and her point of view. “A minister!” she thought. “And a married man! And sentimental and mystical!” But in defiance of self-mockery and self-warnings her mind persisted in coming back to him, persisted in revolving ideas about him which her judgment condemned.
CHAPTER XXI.
A “MARRIED MAN.”
EMILY spent a week in studying “the work” of the Redeemer parish—the activities of its large staff of “workers” of different grades, from ministers down through deacons, deaconesses, teachers, nurses, to unskilled helpers. She attended its schools—day and night; its lectures; its kindergartens and day nurseries; its clubs for grown people, for youths and for children. She examined its pawn-shops, its employment-bureaus, its bath-houses. She was surprised by the many ways in which it touched intimately the lives of that quarter of a million people of various races, languages and religions, having nothing in common except human nature, poverty, and ignorance. She was astonished at the amount of good accomplished—at the actual, visible results.
She had no particular interest in religion or belief in the value of speculations about the matters on which religion dogmatises. Her father’s casual but effective teachings, the books she had read, the talk of the men and of many of the women she had associated with, the results of her own observations and reflections, had strongly entrenched this disposition in prejudice. Her adventure into the parish was therefore the more a revelation. And she found also that while everything was done there in the name of religion, little, almost nothing, was said about religion. “The work,” except in the church and the chapels at distinctly religious meetings, was wholly secular. Here was simply a great plant for enlightening and cheering on those who grope or sit dumb and blind.
At first she was rather contemptuous of “the workers” and was repelled by certain cheap affectations of speech, thought and manner, common to them all. They were, the most of them, it seemed to her, poorly equipped in brains and narrow in their views of life. But when she got beneath the surface, she disregarded externals in her admiration for their unconscious self-sacrifice, their keen pleasure in helping others—and such “others!”—their limitless patience with dirt, stupidity, shiftlessness, and mendacity. She was profoundly moved by the spectacle of these homely labourers, sowing and reaping unweariedly the arid sands of the slums for no other reward than an occasional blade of sickly grass.
She was standing at the window of one of the women’s clubs—the one in Allen street near Grand. It was late in the afternoon and the crowd was homeward-bound from labour. To her it was a forbidding-looking crowd. The blight of ignorance—centuries, innumerable centuries of ignorance—was upon it. Grossness, dulness, craft, mental and physical deformity, streamed monotonously by.
“Depressing, isn’t it?”