"It looks like it. Here's Sunday, and you've come from a half-dozen services to run at the call of a beggar or so who might have had the politeness to wait till week-day. How is the Bowery Mission?"
"Very well," responded the other, showing an interest for the first time. "I have persuaded ten converts to take the pledge of a daily bath. It was tough work."
Salvers laughed. "I should say so. But, you know, that is what I like about your mission. It has the virtue of confusing cleanliness with godliness. Are you still delivering your sermons on hygiene?"
"Yes. You know we have been sending out nurses to women in confinement in connection with those Sunday-night lectures on the care of children. The great question of the tenement-house is the one of the children it produces."
The light that fired his features had chased from them their habitual expression of lethargic calm.
"It is a great work," said the doctor, enthusiastically. "But, do you know, father, it seems to me odd that so intense a believer in the rules of the rubric should have been the first to put religion into practical use among the poor. It seems a direct contradiction to the assertion that the association of the love of beauty with the love of God destroys sympathy for poverty and disease."
A cloud passed over the other's face.
"My predecessor prepared the ground for me," he replied, constrainedly. "I hope to sow the seed for future usefulness."
"And capital seed it is. But, as I said, it saps the sower. You are running a race with Death. No man can work as you work and not pay the penalty. Get an extra assistant."
Father Algarcife shook his head.