Mr. Roberts laid down his pen and sat erect, regarding his wife with a thoughtful, far-away air.
“Flossy,” he said at last, “it is an immense question! You open a perfect mine of anxiety and doubt. I have hovered around the edges for some time, but have generally contrived to shut my eyes and refuse to look into it, because I was afraid of what I might see; and because I did not know—what to do with my knowledge. I have not been the working member of the firm very long, you know, and my special field, until lately, has been the other side of the ocean; but I have been at home long enough to know that there are several hundred young men in our employ who are away from their homes; and knowing, as I do, the price of board in respectable houses, and knowing the salaries which the younger ones receive, it does not require a great deal of penetration to discover that they must have rather dreary homes here, to put it mildly. The fact is, Flossy, I haven't wanted to look into this thing very closely, because I do not see the remedy. Look at our house, for instance, with its three hundred clerks, we'll say, who are away from their friends; suppose one-half, or even one-third, of them are miserably situated, what can I do?”
“Are they not sufficiently well paid to have the ordinary comforts of life?”
“Doubtful. The truth is, what you and I call the ordinary comforts of life takes a good deal of money; and in the city, rents are high, and the boarding-house keepers have hard struggles to make their expenditures meet their income, and they carry economy to the very verge of meanness,—some of them fairly over the verge, I presume; and the result is cheap food, badly cooked,—because well-cooked food means high-priced help,—and cold rooms and dreariness and discomfort everywhere. Now what can be done about it? Then our house is only one of hundreds, and in many of these hundreds they employ more help and give less wages than we; in fact, I know that some of our clerks are looked upon with envy by a great many young men. We never have any trouble in supplying vacancies. People swarm around us, because we have the reputation of being liberal. We are not liberal, however; sometimes I am inclined to think we are hardly fair, yet there is nothing I can do. I am a junior partner, with a great deal of the responsibility, and a third of the voting power, and I can't get salaries raised. I've been working at that problem at intervals for a year, and have accomplished very little. Do you wonder that I keep my eyes as closely shut as I can?”
His wife's face wore a thoughtful, not to say perplexed look; she seemed to have no answer ready; and, after waiting a moment for it, Mr. Roberts bent himself again to the task of getting his business letters answered. Before he had written one more line, her face had cleared. She interrupted him:—
“Evan, when you talk about four hundred clerks, and multiply that by hundreds of houses and more hundreds of clerks, I cannot follow you at all. It is not that I am not impressed with the number,—I am,—it appalls me; but I don't want to be appalled; I want to be helpful. Perhaps just now there is nothing that I can do for the hundreds, so I want to narrow my thoughts down to what, possibly, I can do. What, for instance, can be done towards getting a good young man, like Alfred Ried, into a place that will be just a little bit like a home; that will give him a spot where he can study his Bible in comfort, and invite a friend with whom he wants to pray, or whom he wants to reach and help in any way? That isn't a huge problem. Can't it be solved?”
Her husband smiled.
“He is only one of thousands,” he said.
“Yes, I know; but he is one of thousands. Since we cannot reach thousands, shall we fail to reach one? Evan, I am only one of thousands, but, but how would you argue about me?”
Mr. Roberts laughed again.