The Countess Hilda, cut off from home ties and kindred in the very prime of her maternal powers, had cast her eye on Max with a possessive but with no predatory aim; and in her own illicit fashion, contrary to some qualms of conscience and the strict dictates of her creed, had mothered him through the dangerous years with as little damage to his moral fiber as seemed reasonably possible. And now, not without some pangs of maternal jealousy, but with none of the baser kind, she listened while he sat at her feet and talked of the woman he loved. But the real price to be paid, as she clearly saw, lay still in the future and in all those possibilities of beautiful domestic possession wherein she could have no part. Left to herself she sometimes wept in woeful abandonment at the thought that she and his children must for ever remain strangers; and then she dried her eyes and sat eager and attentive to learn what manner of woman their mother would be, if Max had his present will.
"I met her," said Max, "or rather found her again, washing the floor of a single-room tenement on a 'four-pair back' to the accompaniment of screams from its enraged occupant. And when, as a means of introduction, I tendered assistance, she sent me down to the basement to refill her bucket,—offered me a child's head to wash, and then as an alternative bade me bring in a mattress from a second-hand dealer who had neglected to send it. I went. Required to give proofs of my honesty by a shopman who rightly regarded all strangers with suspicion, I deposited the value, which I forgot afterwards to reclaim, and set off with my load. Before I reached the first corner I made the humiliating discovery that I did not know how to carry it. I was bearing it embraced like an infant in arms, but owing to its size my arms would not go round. Twice it unrolled itself and lay like a drunken thing in the gutter; small children stood round and laughed at me. From one of them came these words of wisdom: 'Lor', 'e's only a gentleman, he don't know nothing!' On my second attempt, not seeing well where I was going, I stumbled into an apple-stall; and immediately I, heir to a throne and engaged in a charitable action, found myself regarded as a criminal lunatic by people quite obviously my superiors in all honest ways of earning a living. A small boy took pity on me and offered to carry it on his back—any distance for a penny. That taught me; I gave him the penny and put it upon my own, and having disentangled myself from the crowd in which for foolishness I had become conspicuous, found with relief that thenceforth no one took any notice of me. The old scriptural act of a man carrying his bed struck nobody there as absurd; the streets of our sweated quarters are far more genuine and human than those in which we parade the clothes they make for us. Ah, yes; that statement, at which you show some incredulity, is directly pertinent to my story; for it was an endeavor to trace my clothes to their origin—over the many impediments and difficulties placed in my way—that had led me into those slums. I won't go into that just now, though it had an important connection with our future acquaintance.
"By the time I returned with the bed to the four-pair back attic I had received a better lesson in human values than in any previous half-hour of my existence. I was then given other commissions, and these without any word of apology; as I had volunteered so I was to be used without scruple or mercy, just as a millionaire's motor-car is used at election times, till scratched, battered, broken down, it creeps from the fray. 'We are all sweated workers here,' she said to me afterwards, and then I saw her uses of me explained; anything which came to that mill came to be ground, and the chaff to be cast out. I submitted to her test, and in that first day saw her only by glimpses; but in accompanying her back to the Home from which she emanated I told her why I had come—said that I wished to have a clear conscience and wear clothes upon my back in which there was no element of sweating. She told me it was quite impossible, impossible, that is to say, unless I controlled every stage of manufacture from the raw material to the finished article; and even then, I was warned, the paper cover, the cardboard box, and the string with which it was tied, would all be sweated products. And when I asked what I could do to help matters, she bade me go with empty pockets and see as much of the life as possible for myself, and make others like myself see it also. That is what she had been doing to me—rubbing my nose into it before I should get tired and run away. Even while accepting it she showed a fine indifference to my money. 'Don't let that salve your conscience,' said she, 'we can make it useful, but it won't change matters.' And had I given her a million pounds I do not think she would have thanked me any more."
All that Prince Max narrated of his charitable adventure would take too long to tell here. One thing the Countess noted, as a point well scored, he had begun to learn humility; his offers of service had been rejected as of little use, his company as a hindrance, his new lady had left him to feel small, and he had not resented it, had indeed owned that her judgment on him was just. He had also put himself to her test of sincerity and failed. "I tried to go on with it," he confessed, "but it was no good. What my father says is quite true—we can't really get at the lives of these people, we are too cut off. We make use of them, they of us; but we are still hiding from each other round corners, or walking on opposite sides of the street. She, having become one of them, meant me to see that."
"But she doesn't know who you are."
"She knows what kind I am; it's all the same."
"You didn't cross after her?"
"How could I? It wouldn't have been manners."
"She presumed on your having them, then?"
"She has a generous nature."