“To be sure, Zee. God’s poor are always with us.”
She bent over suddenly and inspected the handle of a spoon intently.
“But when people can’t pay—rents, mortgages, whatever their troubles are—then what do they do?”
“The balance must be struck in some way. A debt is a debt. A creditor is entitled to his pay. It is the law of the land.”
“The law; yes, I suppose there is the law. But there aren’t any laws for the poor, are there? I heard that—in France. And the peasants over there didn’t look as though they had any laws on their side.”
“It’s very different here; quite different. We are all poor here. This is God’s great republic of the poor, as one of our poets has said.”
“That sounds well, but I’m afraid it’s only poetry,” said Zelda, soberly. And then, smoothing her crumbs into a little heap for the girl to brush away:
“In anything that you have—or I have—we shall deal very kindly with poor people, shan’t we?”
His restless fingers were playing with his coffee spoon and his eyes were on the table-cloth. He looked up now and met Zelda’s gaze bent gravely upon him.
“Yes, what we have—what we have—” there was a slight stress on the pronoun, as though he wished to emphasize the fact of their common interests—“we must use—as God would have us.”