'It isn't only my fastidiousness, as you call it, that is offended,' Vida retorted. 'I am penetrated by the hopelessness of what we're doing. It salves my conscience, or yours——' Hurriedly she added, '——that's not what you mean to do it for, I know, dear—and you're an angel and I'm a mere cumberer of the earth. But when I'm only just "cumbering," I feel less a fraud than when I'm pretending to do good.'
'You needn't pretend.'
'I can't do anything else. To go among your poor makes me feel in my heart that I'm simply flaunting my better fortune.'
'I never saw you flaunting it.'
'Well, I assure you it's when you've got me to go with you on one of your Whitechapel raids that I feel most strongly how outrageous it is that, in addition to all my other advantages, I should buy self-approval by doing some tuppenny-ha'penny service to a toiling, starving fellow-creature.'
Mrs. Fox-Moore set down her coffee-cup. 'You mustn't suppose——' she began.
'No, no,' Vida cut her short. 'I don't doubt your motives. I know too well how ready you are to sacrifice yourself. But it does fill me with a kind of rage to see some of those smug Settlement workers, the people that plume themselves on leaving luxurious homes. They don't say how hideously bored they were in them. They are perfectly enchanted at the excitement and importance they get out of going to live among the poor, who don't want them——'
'Oh, my dear Vida!'
'Not a little bit! Well, the wily paupers do, perhaps, for what they can get out of our sort.'
Mrs. Fox-Moore cast down her eyes as though convicted by the recollection of some concrete example.