At one time it seemed impossible to do anything for her in Chicago, and she was kept for two years in a suburb, where the family of the charity visitor lived, and where she was nursed through several hazardous illnesses.  She now lives a better life than she did, but she is still far from being a model old woman.  The neighbors are constantly shocked by the fact that she is supported and comforted by a “charity lady,” while at the same time she occasionally “rushes the growler,” scolding at the boys lest they jar her in her tottering walk.  The care of her has broken through even that second standard, which the neighborhood had learned to recognize as the standard of charitable societies, that only the “worthy poor” are to be helped; that temperance and thrift are the virtues which receive the plums of benevolence.  The old lady herself is conscious of this criticism.  Indeed, irate neighbors tell her to her face that she doesn’t in the least deserve what she gets.  In order to disarm them, and at the same time to explain what would otherwise seem loving-kindness so colossal as to be abnormal, she tells them that during her sojourn in the suburb she discovered an awful family secret,—­a horrible scandal connected with the long-suffering charity visitor; that it is in order to prevent the divulgence of this that she constantly receives her ministrations.  Some of her perplexed neighbors accept this explanation as simple and offering a solution of this vexed problem.  Doubtless many of them have a glimpse of the real state of affairs, of the love and patience which ministers to need irrespective of worth.  But the standard is too high for most of them, and it sometimes seems unfortunate to break down the second standard, which holds that people who “rush the growler” are not worthy of charity, and that there is a certain justice attained when they go to the poorhouse.  It is certainly dangerous to break down the lower, unless the higher is made clear.

Just when our affection becomes large enough to care for the unworthy among the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our own kin, is certainly a perplexing question.  To say that it should never be so, is a comment upon our democratic relations to them which few of us would be willing to make.

Of what use is all this striving and perplexity?  Has the experience any value?  It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charity visitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do.  It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, they claim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member of a sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods do, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, so that she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, and thus she is not harassed by a constant attempt at adjustment.

Both the tenement-house resident and the sister assume to have put themselves upon the industrial level of their neighbors, although they have left out the most awful element of poverty, that of imminent fear of starvation and a neglected old age.