CHAPTER IX.
HOME STANDARDS.
The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently neglects to note the results it attains.
There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do not use the word in its financial sense wholly.
Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost certainly, not once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!
When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.
THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.
The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more than the relation of child to parents.