She looked about the beautiful room with a sort of fright: it seemed to her that the warm and stately walls hid human misery lying close outside,—hunger and hatred, cold and sickness, and the terror of to-morrow. The impudent luxury of this enormous wealth struck her like a blow on the mouth.
“They,” she said, with a sob, “are hungry.”
Her brother, divided between irritation and amusement, was touched in spite of himself.
“My dear Lily,” he said, “you can’t understand this thing. To put it vulgarly, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Look here, the men can go to work to-morrow if they want to; but they don’t want to. I offer them work, and they can take it or leave it. Well, they leave it. It’s their affair, not mine.”
But she shook her head miserably. “I don’t understand it. If you were poor, too, it would be different.”
“Well, really!” said Mrs. Blair.
But Robert Blair was wonderfully patient.
“There’s another thing you must remember, Lily; these people are far better off on what I am willing to pay them than they were in Europe, where most of them came from.”
“But, Robert,” she said passionately, “because they could be worse off doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t be better off. And—it isn’t kind.”
“Kind?” Her brother looked at her blankly, and then, with a shout of laughter, “Lydia, you are as good as a play! No, my dear; I don’t run my mills for kindness.”