The greatest difficulty is experienced when the two standards come sharply together, and when both sides make an attempt at understanding and explanation.  The difficulty of making clear one’s own ethical standpoint is at times insurmountable.  A woman who had bought and sold school books stolen from the school fund,—­books which are all plainly marked with a red stamp,—­came to Hull House one morning in great distress because she had been arrested, and begged a resident “to speak to the judge.”  She gave as a reason the fact that the House had known her for six years, and had once been very good to her when her little girl was buried.  The resident more than suspected that her visitor knew the school books were stolen when buying them, and any attempt to talk upon that subject was evidently considered very rude.  The visitor wished to get out of her trial, and evidently saw no reason why the House should not help her.  The alderman was out of town, so she could not go to him.  After a long conversation the visitor entirely failed to get another point of view and went away grieved and disappointed at a refusal, thinking the resident simply disobliging; wondering, no doubt, why such a mean woman had once been good to her; leaving the resident, on the other hand, utterly baffled and in the state of mind she would have been in, had she brutally insisted that a little child should lift weights too heavy for its undeveloped muscles.

Such a situation brings out the impossibility of substituting a higher ethical standard for a lower one without similarity of experience, but it is not as painful as that illustrated by the following example, in which the highest ethical standard yet attained by the charity recipient is broken down, and the substituted one not in the least understood:—­

A certain charity visitor is peculiarly appealed to by the weakness and pathos of forlorn old age.  She is responsible for the well-being of perhaps a dozen old women to whom she sustains a sincerely affectionate and almost filial relation.  Some of them learn to take her benefactions quite as if they came from their own relatives, grumbling at all she does, and scolding her with a family freedom.  One of these poor old women was injured in a fire years ago.  She has but the fragment of a hand left, and is grievously crippled in her feet.  Through years of pain she had become addicted to opium, and when she first came under the visitor’s care, was only held from the poorhouse by the awful thought that she would there perish without her drug.  Five years of tender care have done wonders for her.  She lives in two neat little rooms, where with her thumb and two fingers she makes innumerable quilts, which she sells and gives away with the greatest delight.  Her opium is regulated to a set amount taken each day, and she has been drawn away from much drinking.  She is a voracious reader, and has her head full of strange tales made up from books and her own imagination.