"I don't know why you ask me. I can do nothing. It is not my business."
"Will it do to assume that as quite certain?"
"Why yes. What can I do with a set of master tailors?"
"You can cry down the cheap shops; and say why."
"Are the dear shops any better?"
Mr. Dillwyn laughed. "Presumably! But talking—even your talking—will not do all. I want you to think about it."
"I don't want to think about it," answered the lady. "It's beyond me. Poverty is people's own fault. Industrious and honest people can always get along."
"If sickness does not set in, or some father, or husband, or son does not take to bad ways."
"How can I help all that?" asked the lady somewhat pettishly. "I never knew you were in the benevolent and reformatory line before, Mr. Dillwyn. What has put all this in your head?"
"Those scarfs, for one thing. Another thing was a visit I had lately occasion to make. It was near midday. I found a room as bare as a room could be, of all that we call comfort; in the floor a small pine table set with three plates, bread, cold herrings, and cheese. That was the dinner for a little boy, whom I found setting the table, and his father and mother. The parents work in a factory hard by, from early to late; they have had sickness in the family this autumn, and are too poor to afford a fire to eat their dinner by, or to make it warm, so the other child, a little girl, has been sent away for the winter. It was frostily cold the day I was there. The boy goes to school in the afternoon, and comes home in time to light up a fire for his father and mother to warm themselves by at evening. And the mother has all her housework to do after she comes home."