“That’s a very neat thrust,” said the girl. “Thank you. Do you know what the Doctor says about all this reform-scheming and theorizing?”
“No.”
“That it is all ‘shoveling-fog.’ That is a ’longshore expression. Don’t you like it?”
“Very much,” I said. “But doesn’t it suit as well any kind of talking, even the discussion of the ‘Is-life-worth-living’ question?”
“You must have been doing some especially good deed,” said Janet, leaning her pretty head against the back of her chair and looking at me through half-shut eyes. “You are so disagreeable. There isn’t any soil that philanthropy thrives in so well as in the ruins of the social and domestic virtues.”
“Child,” I said, “I did not mean to be personal. Why don’t you stop thinking, and try to find shoes and stockings for some of my poor people?”
Quick tears sprang into her shining eyes.
“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;
I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”
she quoted. “I do not know what the poor have done that I should descend upon them as a last affliction. First, dirt; then a financial crisis and no work; then hunger and cold; and then I. It is like the plagues in Egypt.”