"And sure you won't take your failures and disappointments to heart too deeply?"
"Quite sure I can bear them bravely," answered the girl. "If only one, just one, of those poor creatures may be helped, and lifted up, and brought out of darkness, it will be worth trying for!"
"And what does Robert Johns say about it?"
A glow kindled in Angela's face.
"Robert is in perfect sympathy with me," she said softly. Then again, this time having risen and gone around to his side, to speak with her face against the old banker's smoothly shaven cheek, "It is 'yes,' isn't it, daddy dear?"
"Well, yes! Only you must go slow, dear. You are not over strong, you know."
And soon it came to pass that on a vacant lot, hitherto given over to refuse heaps, haunted by stray cats, ragpickers, and vagrant children, in one of the vilest quarters of the metropolis, there sprang up, with magic swiftness, a commodious frame building, surrounded by smooth green sod, known in the lower circles as the Locust Street Home; in upper circles, laughingly denominated "Angela's Experiment."
Angela did not mind. It was mostly goodnatured laughter, and many of the laughers ended by lending willing hands and hearts to the cause. It was wonderful how the news spread through the city's purlieus that here was a sanctuary into which cold, hunger, and fatigue dared not intrude; a place which the lowest might enter and be made welcome, and go unquestioned, his personal rights as carefully respected as though he were one of the Four Hundred.
That was Angela's theory. No man, woman, or child should be compelled to anything. First make their bodies comfortable, then surround them with ennobling influences and examples, entertain them, arouse them, stimulate them, hold out the helping hand, and leave the rest to God. "They shall not even be compelled to be clean!" she said, laughing. "If the beautiful clean bathrooms and clean clothing do not tempt them to cleanliness, then so be it! I will have no rules; only influences. You will see!"
And people did see, and wondered.