“Oh no,” she laughed, “not going crazy.  Just trying to think a little about things.  But don’t you ever hear them, uncle?  I should think they might—­bother you sometimes.”

“Really, Katherine,” he said stiffly, “this is most—­annoying.  Hear whom moaning and sobbing?”

“Those people!  The worn out shop girls and broken down men and women and diseased children that your church is built right on top of!”

Not the words but the sob behind them moved him to ask gently:  “Katie dear, what is it?  What’s the trouble?”

Her eyes were swimming.  “Uncle—­it’s the misery of the world!  It’s the people who aren’t where they belong!  It’s the lives ruined through blunders—­it’s the cruelty—­the needless cruelty of it all.”  She leaned forward, the tears upon her cheeks.  “Uncle, how can you?  You have a mind—­a kind heart.  But what good are they?  If you believe the things you say you believe—­oh you think you believe them—­but you don’t seem to connect them.  Here to-night we’ve been talking about the forms of the church—­finances of the church—­and humanity is in need, uncle—­bodily need—­and oh the heart need!  Why don’t you go and see?  Why you’ve only to look!  What are your puny little problems of the church compared with people’s lives?  And yet you—­cut off—­detached—­save in so far as feeding on them goes—­claim to be following in the footsteps of a man who followed in their footsteps—­a man who went about seeing how people lived—­finding out what troubled them—­trying—­” She sank back with a sob.  “I didn’t mean to—­but I simply can’t understand it. Can’t understand how you can.”

She hid her face. Those faces—­they passed and passed.

He had risen and was walking about the room.  After a moment he stopped and cleared his throat.  “If I didn’t think, Katherine, that something had happened to almost derange you, I should not have permitted you to continue these ravings.”

She raised her head defiantly.  “Truths people don’t want to hear are usually disposed of as ravings!”

“Now if I may be permitted a word.  Your indictment is not at all new, though your heat in making it would indicate you believed yourself to be saying something never said before—­”

“I know it’s been said before!  I’m more interested in knowing how it’s been answered.”

“You have never seemed sufficiently interested in the affairs of the church, Katherine, for one to think of seriously discussing our charities with you—­”

“Uncle, do you know what your charities make me think of?”

He had resumed his chair—­and cigar.  “No,” he said coldly, “I do not know what they make you ‘think of.’  I was attempting to tell you what they were.”

“I know what they are.  The idea that comes to my mind has a rather vulgar—­”

“Oh, pray do not hesitate, Katherine.  You have not been speaking what I would call delicately.”