"Does that strike you as too unpractical and fantastic, contrary to sound, philanthropic principle and practice?"
Honoria shook her head.
"It is based on a higher law than any of modern organised philanthropy," she said, and her voice had a queer unsteadiness in it. "It goes back to the Gospels—to the matter of giving your life for your friend."
As she spoke, Honoria rose. She went across and stood at the window. Furtively she dabbed her pocket handkerchief against her eyes.
"Well, after all, one must give one's life for something or other, you know," Dickie remarked, "or the days would become a little too intolerably dull, and then one might be tempted to make short work of life altogether."
Honoria returned to her chair and sat down—this time not on the arm of it but in ordinary conventional fashion. She faced Richard. He observed that her eyelids were slightly swollen, slightly red. This gave an extraordinary effect of gentleness to her expression.
"How do you find them—the members of your sad family?" she asked.
"Oh, in all sorts of ways and of places! Knott swears it is contrary to reason, an interfering with the beneficent tendency of nature to kill off the unfit. Yet he works like a horse to help me—even talks of giving up his practice and moving to Farley Row, so as to be near the headquarters of my establishment. The lease of a rather charming, old house there fell in this year. Fortunately the tenant did not want to renew, so I am having that made comfortable for them."
Richard smiled. A greater sense of well-being animated him. Out of the world she had come, back into the world she would go again. Meanwhile she was nobly fair to look upon, she was pure of heart, intercourse with her made for the justification of high purposes and unselfish experiment—so he thought.
"I am growing as keen on bagging a fine cripple as another man might on bagging a fine tiger," he said. "The whole matter at bottom, I suspect, turns on the instinct of sport.—Only the week before last I acquired a rather terribly superior specimen. A lad of eighteen, a factory hand in Westchurch. He was caught by some loose gearing and swept into the machinery. What is left of him—if it survives, which it had much better not, and I can't help hoping it will, he is such a plucky, sweet-natured fellow—will require a nurse for the rest of its life. So I am pushing on the work at Farley, that the home may be ready when we get him out of hospital.—By the way, I must go to-morrow and stir up the workmen. Do you care to come and see it all, if the afternoon is fine and not too hot?"