“You oughtn't to give money in real life,” said the lady. “You ought to give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are impostors.”
“It's some comfort to know that the charities are so active,” said the elderly young lady, “even if half the letters one gets do turn out to be appeals from them.”
“It's very disappointing to have them do it, though,” said the artist, lightly. “I thought there was a society to abolish poverty. That doesn't seem to be so active as the charities this winter. Is it possible they've found it a failure?”
“Well,” said Mr. Bullion, “perhaps they have suspended during the hard times.”
They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have, and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes' walk of their warmth and surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, “Who goes there?” the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the street below, “Despair!”
“I had an amusing experience,” Mr. Twelvemough began, “when I was doing a little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.”
“For the sake of the literary material?” the artist suggested.
“Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor's son, who had got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper any more.”
“A checkered employ,” the banker mused aloud.
“It was not of a simultaneous nature,” the novelist explained. “So he came on the charities, and, as I knew the theatrical profession a little, and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a manager whom I knew to be a good fellow, and I asked him for some sort of work. He said, Yes, send the man round, and he would give him a job copying parts for a new play he had written.”