“Have you many such hands as this?  What are you going to do with them?  Keep them at puddling iron?”

Kirby shrugged his shoulders.  Mitchell’s look had irritated him.

“Ce n’est pas mon affaire.  I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses.  I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches.  The Lord will take care of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation.  I have heard you call our American system a ladder which any man can scale.  Do you doubt it?  Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat table-land,—­eh, May?”

The Doctor looked vexed, puzzled.  Some terrible problem lay hid in this woman’s face, and troubled these men.  Kirby waited for an answer, and, receiving none, went on, warning with his subject.

“I tell you, there’s something wrong that no talk of ‘Liberte’ or ‘Egalite’ will do away.  If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines,—­nothing more,—­hands.  It would be kindness.  God help them!  What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?” He pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap.  “So many nerves to sting them to pain.  What if God had put your brain, with all its agony of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?”

“You think you could govern the world better?” laughed the Doctor.

“I do not think at all.”

“That is true philosophy.  Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find bottom, eh?”

“Exactly,” rejoined Kirby.  “I do not think.  I wash my hands of all social problems,—­slavery, caste, white or black.  My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—­the pay-hour on Saturday night.  Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other’s throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible.”

The Doctor sighed,—­a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.

“God help us!  Who is responsible?”

“Not I, I tell you,” said Kirby, testily.  “What has the man who pays them money to do with their souls’ concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?”

“And yet,” said Mitchell’s cynical voice, “look at her!  How hungry she is!”

Kirby tapped his boot with his cane.  No one spoke.  Only the dumb face of the rough image looking into their faces with the awful question, “What shall we do to be saved?” Only Wolfe’s face, with its heavy weight of brain, its weak, uncertain mouth, its desperate eyes, out of which looked the soul of his class,—­only Wolfe’s face turned towards Kirby’s.  Mitchell laughed,—­a cool, musical laugh.

“Money has spoken!” he said, seating himself lightly on a stone with the air of an amused spectator at a play.  “Are you answered?”—­turning to Wolfe his clear, magnetic face.

Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath.  He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.