“I used to bother about it too when I was young,” said the old man at his side.  “I used to feel, I reckon, pretty near as bad as you are feeling now, but it don’t last.  When you get on a bit you’ll sort of settle down and begin to work it out.  That’s life.  Yes, but it ain’t the whole of life.  It ain’t even the biggest part.  Those folks we’ve been to see have had their good times like the rest of us, only we saw ’em just now when they were in the midst of a bad time.  Life ain’t confined to a ditch any more than it is to what Gideon calls a lily-pond.  Keep your balance, that’s the main thing.  Whatever else you lose, you must be sure to keep your balance, or you’ll be in danger of going overboard.”

“Do you mean that there is no remedy for conditions like this?”

The old man pondered his answer so long that Stephen thought he had either given up or forgotten the question.

“The only remedy I have ever been able to see is to work not on conditions, but on human nature,” he replied.  “Improve human nature, and then you will improve the conditions in which it lives.  Improve the rich as well as the poor.  Teach ’em to be human beings, not machines, to one another—­that’s Gideon’s idea, you know,—­humanize—­Christianize, if you like it better—­civilize.  It’s a pretty hopeless problem—­the individual case—­charity is all rotten from root to branch.  If you could see the harm that’s been done by mistaken charity!  Why, look at my friend, Mrs. Page, now.  She tried to work it out that way, and what came of it except more rottenness?  And yet until the State looks after the unemployed, there is obliged to be charity.”

“Do you mean Mrs. Kent Page?” asked Stephen in surprise, and remembered that his mother had once accused Corinna of trying to “undermine society.”

“She is one of my best friends,” answered the old man, with mingled pride and affection.  “I go to see her in her shop every now and then, and I reckon she values my advice about her affairs as much as anybody’s.  Well, when she came home from Europe she found that she owned a row of tenements like this one, and her agent was profiteering in rents like most of the others.  I wish you could have seen her when she discovered it.  Splendid?  Well, I reckon she’s the most splendid thing this old world has ever had on top of it!  She went straight to work and had those houses made into modern apartments—­bathrooms, steam heat, and back yards full of trees and grass and flowers, just like Monroe Park, only better.  The rent wasn’t raised either!  She put that back just where it was before the war; and then she let the whole row to the tenants for two years.  You never saw anything like the interest she took in that speculation—­you’d have thought to hear her that she was setting out to bring what the preachers call the social millennium.”

“She never mentioned it to me,” said Stephen, with interest.  “How did it turn out?”