“A good many people have no roofs over their heads,” Mr. Chapley meekly suggested.
“That’s no reason why we shouldn’t,” said his wife.
“No; you’re right there, my dear. That’s the hopeless part of it. Perhaps poor David is right, and the man who attempts to solve the problem of altruism singly and in his own life”—
Mrs. Brandreth would not let him finish. “The question is, what are we going to do for these poor things in their trouble?” She looked at Ray, who had sat by trying in his sense of intrusion and superfluity to shrink into as small a space as possible. He now blushed to find himself appealed to. He had not seen Mrs. Brandreth often, and he had not reversed his first impression of a narrow, anxious, housewifely spirit in her, sufficient to the demands of young motherhood, but of few and scanty general sympathies.
“When did you see them last?” she asked.
He told her, and she said, “Well, I am going right up there with Percy.”
“And bring back the scarlet fever to your child!” cried her mother. “You shall neither of you go, as long as I have anything to say about it. Or, if you do, you shall not come back to this house, and I shall keep the baby here till there isn’t the least fear of danger; and I don’t know how long that will be.”
All the grandmother rose in Mrs. Chapley; she lifted her voice, and in the transport of her alarm and indignation she suddenly appealed to Mr. Kane from the wilfulness she evidently feared in her daughter: “What do you think, Mr. Kane?”
“I wouldn’t presume to decide such a question finally; it’s too important,” Kane said, in his mellow murmur. “But I wish that for the moment Mrs. Brandreth would let me be the bearer of her kind messages and inquiries. If you haven’t been in the habit of calling there”—
“I have never been there at all, I’m sorry to say,” Mrs. Brandreth frankly declared.