She started and glanced around. Beside her, reading her thoughts in her face, was Dr. Stanhope. Instead of his baggy, unclerical tweed suit, he was wearing the uniform of his order. It sat strangely upon him, like a livery; and, she thought, he hasn’t in the least the look of the liveried, of one who is part of any sort of organisation. “He looks as lone, as ‘unorganised,’ as self-sufficient, as a mountain.”
“Depressing?” she said, shaking her head with an expression of distaste. “It’s worse—it’s hopeless.”
“No,—not hopeless. And you ought not to look at it with disgust. It’s the soil—the rotten loam from which the grain and the fruit and the flowers spring.”
“I don’t think so. To me it’s simply a part of the great stagnant, disease-breeding marsh which receives the sewage of society.”
“I sha’n’t go on with the analogy. But your theory and mine are in the end the same. We all sprang from this; and the top is always flowering and dropping back into it to spring up again.”
“I see nothing but ignorance that cannot learn. It seems to me nearly all the effort spent upon it is wasted. If nature were left alone, she would drain, drain, drain, until at last she might drain it away.”
“Yours is an unjust view, I think. I won’t say anything,” this with a faint smile, “about the souls that are worth saving. But if we by working here open the way for a few, maybe a very few, to rise who would otherwise not have risen, we have not worked in vain. My chief interest is the children.”
“Yes,” she admitted, her face lighting up, “there is hope for the children. You don’t know how it has affected me to see what you and your people are doing for them. It’s bound to tell. It is telling.”
He looked at her as if she were his queen and had bestowed some honour upon him which he had toiled long to win. “Thank you,” he said. “It means a great deal to me to have you say that.”
She gave him a careless glance of derisive incredulity.