Mr. Peck merely said, “He has shown great self-control;” and she perceived that he was not going to say more. He listened patiently to the reasons she gave for not having offered Mrs. Putney anything more than passive sympathy at a time when help could only have cumbered and kindness wounded her, but he made no sign of thinking them either necessary or sufficient. In the meantime he had not formally consented to Idella's remaining with her, and Annie prepared to lead back to that affair as artfully as she could.
“I really want you to believe, Mr. Peck, that I think very differently on some points from what I did when we first talked about the Social Union, and I have you to thank for seeing things in a new light. And you needn't,” she added lightly, “be afraid of my contaminating Idella's mind with any wicked ideas. I'll do my best to keep her from coveting kittens or property of any kind; though I've always heard my father say that civilisation was founded upon the instinct of ownership, and that it was the only thing that had advanced the world. And if you dread the danger of giving her advantages, as you say, or bettering her worldly lot,” she continued, with a smile for his quixotic scruples, “why, I'll do my best to reduce her blessings to a minimum; though I don't see why the poor little thing shouldn't get some good from the inequalities that there always must be in the world.”
“I am not sure there always must be inequalities in the world,” answered the minister.
“There always have been,” cried Annie.
“There always had been slavery, up to a certain time,” he replied.
“Oh, but surely you don't compare the two!” Annie pleaded with what she really regarded as a kind of lunacy in the good man. “In the freest society, I've heard my father say, there is naturally an upward and downward tendency; a perfect level is impossible. Some must rise, and some must sink.”
“But what do you mean by rising? If you mean in material things, in wealth and the power over others that it gives—”
“I don't mean that altogether. But there are other ways—in cultivation, refinement, higher tastes and aims than the great mass of people can have. You have risen yourself, Mr. Peck.”
“I have risen, as you call it,” he said, with a meek sufferance of the application of the point to himself. “Those who rise above the necessity of work for daily bread are in great danger of losing their right relation to other men, as I said when we talked of this before.”
A point had remained in Annie's mind from her first talk with Dr. Morrell. “Yes; and you said once that there could be no sympathy between the rich and the poor—no real love—because they had not had the same experience of life. But how is it about the poor who become rich? They have had the same experience.”