“My dear,” he said, after an hour or two passed in desultory conversation, “may I beg that you will keep away from the operatives? Impulsive and injudicious charity does them more harm than anything else. No doubt the part of Lady Bountiful seems a pleasant and desirable one, but, just now, you are not fitted for it.”
“What do you mean, sir?” asked she in a puzzled tone.
“For instance,” he went on, “the money you gave a certain old woman on the corporation yesterday was taken by her son-in-law last night, and furnished him an opportunity for a glorious old drunk. I beg your pardon for using their phraseology. He was arrested before morning for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.”
“I do not comprehend,” she stammered. “The woman said they had no meat. She was actually suffering for nourishing food. I gave the money, impulsively it is true, but that they need not go hungry.”
“Now, you see, my dear,” he answered, “just how much encouragement one gets in trying to do anything for the laboring classes. They turn upon you and use the goodness of your heart and your generous motives to drag themselves down to a lower depth of degradation. Good-day, my dear, and don’t be led away by your feelings.”
Salome stood looking after him, heart-sick and discouraged. The world—her part of it, at least—was all wrong, and she, with plenty of money and an awakening desire to help, was powerless. She ordered the pony phaeton again and started for a drive. She obeyed a sudden impulse to go through the factory precincts. There were evidences of a suppressed excitement. Knots of desperate-looking men stood about. But they hushed their voices as she drew near, and stood in sullen silence as she passed.
“There is evidently something in the wind,” she thought, urging the pony to quicken his pace.
She did not know that the committee from the Labor Union had that morning made a third attempt to treat with her agent and failed.
“No compromise,” was still his watchword.
“I’ll send for Marion Shaw,” she said to herself, on her way home an hour later. “She is a practical, sensible, business-like woman. Perhaps she will know of some way to help me to help others. And she needs rest.”