She nodded.
“I am beginning to understand a little better,” she said. “Now you must tell me this. Why did you entertain the idea of mission work in a place like Thorpe, when the whole of that awful East End was there waiting for you?”
“All the world of reformers,” he answered, “rushes to the East End. We fancied there was as important work to be done in less obvious places.”
“And you started your work,” she asked, “directly you left college?”
“Before, I think,” he answered. “You see, I wasn’t alone. There were several of us who felt the same way—Holderness, for instance, the man who came to your house with me the other night. He works altogether upon the political side. He’s a Socialist—of a sort. Two of the others went into the Church, one became a medical missionary. I joined in with a few who thought that we might do more effective work without tying ourselves down to anything, or subscribing to any religious denomination.”
She looked at him curiously. He was tall, broad-shouldered and muscular. He wore even his shabby clothes with an air of distinction.
“I suppose,” she said calmly, “that I must belong to a very different world. But what I cannot understand is why you should choose a career which you intend to pursue apparently for the benefit of other people. All the young men whom I have known who have taken life seriously enough to embrace a career at all, have at least studied their individual tastes.”
“Well,” he answered, smiling, “it isn’t that I fancy myself any better than my fellows. I was at Magdalen, you know, under Heysey. I think that it was his influence which shaped our ideas.”
“Yes! I have heard of him,” she said thoughtfully. “He was a good man. At least every one says so. I’m afraid I don’t know much about good men myself. Most of those whom I have met have been the other sort.”
The faint bitterness of her tone troubled him. There was deliberation, too, in her words. Instinctively he knew that this was no idle speech.