"I have been down town, and remained longer than I intended, and I want you, please, to take me home."
"I thought you were asking a favor, not bestowing one. Where are you?"
"At the settlement."
"In Rivington Street?" Wesley set his teeth as he asked it.
"Yes."
"Very well, I'll be over right away."
He rang off and left the office. He was sorry that he had dismissed the cab, for he expected to need it when he reached the first stage of his journey; but the way was not long to the place that Marian had named, and, even had it been twice as far to the settlement, Dyker, who walked thither with the feet of chagrin, would not have remarked the distance.
In the midst of Rivington Street, in a house that used, long ago, to be a Methodist parsonage, a little group of devoted women are doing their best to redeem, by social activities, the people of the neighborhood from the benighted condition in which the people's lot is cast. This best has now been done for more years than a few, and the people, still considering it necessary to remain alive, and still knowing that to remain alive they must submit to the economic system imposed upon them, continue discouragingly unredeemed. But the devoted women, though they neglect the disease for its symptoms, persist as only feminine natures can persist.
They are college-bred women with the limitations and emancipations of their class; and they have a great deal to occupy their attention besides their essays in social entertainment. For the most part they pass their days in really practical investigation. One of them will inspect the public schools and impartially consider curricula and ventilation. Another will visit tenements and ask housewives personal questions for the tabular benefit of the Russell Sage Foundation. A third goes into the laundries of the best hotels and finds that these hostelries force their washerwomen to sleep twenty in a room. Yet, when they return to Rivington Street, these daylight investigators spur their wearied nerves to further exertion and go forward, not to teach the toilers the practical cause and remedy of the economic evil, but to form the boys and girls, the young women and young men, into reading groups, debating clubs, sewing circles, cooking classes, and elocutionary juntas. Their zeal is boundless, their martyrdom sadly genuine, and, if there is humor, there is something more than humor in their ultimate complaint:
"Some of our people we retain, but most of them slip away, and, even with the best of fortune, we seem, somehow, able to do so little."