“Some of those little girls from the publishing houses look paler to me than they did,” Nancy said. “I wish I could give them hypodermics of protein and carbohydrates.”
“Give me the name and address of any of your customers that worry you,” Dick said, “and I’ll buy ’em a cow or a sugar plum tree or a flivver or anything else they seem to be in need of.”
“Don’t those things tend to pauperize the poor?” Caroline’s brother put in gravely.
“Sure they do,” Billy agreed, “only Nancy has kind of given up her struggle not to pauperize them.”
“I started in with some very high ideals about scientific service,” Nancy explained. “I was 267 never going to give anybody anything they hadn’t actually earned in some way, except to bring up the average of normality by feeding my patrons surreptitious calories. I had it all figured out that the only legitimate charity was putting flesh on the bones of the human race,—that increasing the general efficiency that way wasn’t really charity at all.”
“You don’t believe that now?” Preston Eustace asked.
“I don’t know what I believe now.”
“What is scientific charity, anyhow?” Dick looked about inquiringly.
“There ain’t no such animal,” Billy contributed.
“It’s substituting the cool human intellect for the warm human heart, I guess,” Betty said dreamily.