“Why are you two silly things sitting together in the dark?” said Susie’s voice at the door.
CHAPTER XVI
“There is a good deal to be said for subscription lists all the same,” said Mr. Manley. “How could you have the hospitals and other places kept going?” Teresa often went to the old man for help in her schemes, as he had invited her to do on their first acquaintance. They were good friends, though his tolerance of institutions, governors, spiritual pastors and masters puzzled her when she tried to piece it together with the other side of his character; the side which made him impatient with all sorts of pomposity and humbug. He delighted in the removal of lifeless traditions and he welcomed to his house the whole of the small army of people who fought for the life of the city against vanity, self-interest and stupidity.
“But the way people go home to a fat dinner, with servants running round the table with more dishes, after they have sat listening to speeches about all sorts of deadly necessities makes me sick,” she said. “They sign a cheque for a sum that is just large enough to look impressive on a list, but that won’t make the least difference to the way they live; and then they think they have done everything that can possibly be required of them.”
“If would be a dull world if there were no kindness, only obligation and compulsion,” he remarked. “I like people who are charitable to the poverty of my intelligence, so why not to the poverty of my comforts.”
“But if some starving genius were to head a list of people who were kind to Mr. Price’s intelligence he wouldn’t be grateful.”
“Well, if we are going to pounce upon ingratitude and snobbery in one place let us be down on it all round,” he said. “I tell you that kindness is a good thing anywhere, and though giving and taking is always a ticklish business because people think too much of themselves, that doesn’t make it any less good. By the way, did you know that Fisk has got himself locked up?”
“I am delighted to hear it,” said Teresa, “but what for especially?”
“Inciting to breach of the peace. Of course that has finished him so far as his career goes. He never got his degree and now he is too old and too mad. He was quite a decent boy. I used to employ his father and knew him quite well. He was as keen as possible on educating the lad. Cranston has a great deal to answer for, wasting these boys’ time so that they don’t work at anything. Fisk will have to be a paid agitator when he comes out in order to make a living. He’ll never go back to learn a trade now.”
“How do you manage to stand the Prices?” Teresa resumed presently, going back to her train of thought. “I have often wondered. And Mrs. Carpenter—— Oh, dear me, I have got to hate rich people since we came here. At first I was worried about the poor. I wanted money not to matter either way, so that one could make friends anywhere and there shouldn’t be a barrier of habits and manners that some of them were born into and that cut them off from their natural friends in other classes.”