'No; even the excellent Barlow was for multiplying Rowton Houses. You can never get men to realize—you can't always get women——'
'It's the work least able to wait,' said Miss Levering.
'I don't agree with you,' Mrs. Heriot bridled, 'and I happen to have spent a great deal of my life in works of charity.'
'Ah, then,'—Miss Levering lifted her eyes from the map to Mrs. Heriot's face—'you'll be interested in the girl I saw dying in a tramp ward a little while ago. Glad her cough was worse, only she mustn't die before her father. Two reasons. Nobody but her to keep the old man out of the workhouse, and "father is so proud." If she died first, he would starve—worst of all, he might hear what had happened up in London to his girl.'
With an air of profound suspicion, Mrs. Heriot interrupted—
'She didn't say, I suppose, how she happened to fall so low?'
'Yes, she did. She had been in service. She lost the train back one Sunday night, and was too terrified of her employer to dare to ring him up after hours. The wrong person found her crying on the platform.'
'She should have gone to one of the Friendly Societies.'
'At eleven at night?'
'And there are the Rescue Leagues. I myself have been connected with one for twenty years——'