"I mean to take up the work that I have told you of."
"But that's folly, Marian!"
He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he uttered it, he knew that he had erred. "Folly" is the word that youth most resents.
Marian withdrew her hands.
"It is strange," she said, "to hear you, of all men, laugh at an attempt to help the poor."
"I am not laughing; I'm too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I can't pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can't help these people without training——"
"I can get training."
"Without knowing them?"
"The only way to know them is to go to them."
"But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways."