“Why, it’s dreadful!” said Margery. “She seems to have lost all ambition—to be ready to let things go.”
“That’s just the worst of it,” said Eleanor. “And it’s in making them see that there’s still hope and cheer and good friendship in the world that we can help them most. I do think we can be of some practical use to them, too, but the main thing is to brace them up, and make them want to be busy helping themselves. It would be so easy for me to give them the money to start over again or I could get my friends to come in with me, and make up the money, if I couldn’t do it all myself.”
“But they ought to do it for themselves, you mean?”
“Yes. They’ll really be ever so much better off in the long run if it’s managed that way. Often and often, in the city, I’ve heard the people who work in the charity organizations tell about families that were quite ruined because they were helped too much.”
“I can see how that would be,” said Margery. “They would get into the habit of thinking they couldn’t do anything for themselves—that they could turn to someone else whenever they got into trouble.”
“Yes. You see these poor people are in the most awful sort of trouble now. They’re discouraged and hopeless. Well, the thing to do is to make them understand that they can rise superior to their troubles, that they can build a new home on the ashes of their old one.”
“Oh, I think it will be splendid if we can help them to do that!”
“They’ll feel better, physically, as soon as they have had a good dinner, Margery. Often and often people don’t think enough about that. It’s when people feel worst that they ought to be fed best. It’s impossible to be cheerful on an empty stomach. When people are well nourished their troubles never seem so great. They look on the bright side and they tell themselves that maybe things aren’t as bad as they look.”
“How can we help them otherwise, though!”
“Oh, we’ll fix up a place where they can sleep to-night, for one thing. And we’ll help them to start clearing away all the rubbish. They’ve got to have a new house, of course, and they can’t even start work on that until all this wreckage is cleared away.”