"Many can look after herself, and uncommonly well too," Mr. Bullsom answered.
"She comes mostly in the evening," Brooks explained, "but she is one of my most useful helpers."
"It must be so interesting to do good," Louise said, artlessly. "After dinner, Mr. Brooks, will you tell us all about it?"
"It seems so odd that you should care so much for that sort of thing," Selina remarked. "As a rule it is the frumpy and uninteresting people who go in for visiting the poor and doing good, isn't it? You seem so young, and so—oh, I don't think I'd better go on."
"Please do," Brooks begged.
"Well, you won't think I was trying to flatter, will you, but I was going to say, and too clever for that sort of thing."
Brooks smiled.
"Perhaps," he said, "the reason that social reform is so urgently needed in so many ways is for that very reason, Miss Bullsom—that the wrong sort of person has been going in for it. Looking after the poor has meant for most people handing out bits of charity on the toasting-fork of religion. And that sort of thing doesn't tend to bridge over the gulf, does it?"
"Toasting-fork!" Selina giggled. "How funny you are, Mr. Brooks."
"Am I?" he answered, good-humouredly. "Now let me hear what you have been doing since I saw you in town."