“North of Marshall Street.  A quarter which was once very prosperous; but that was before your day.  This is one of several rows of old houses, well-built in their time, better built, indeed, than any houses we’re putting up now; but their day is over.  The cost of repairing them would be so great that the agent is deliberately letting the property run down in the hope that this part of the street will soon be turned over to negroes.  The negroes are so crowded in their quarter that they are obliged to expand, and when they do, this investment will yield a still higher interest.  Coloured tenants stand crowding better than white ones, and they will pay a better rent for worse housing.  As it is the rent of these houses has doubled since the beginning of the war.”

“Good God!” said Stephen.  “Do we stop here?”

“I want you to see Canning, the man the Governor told you about.  He can’t pay his rent, which was raised last Saturday, and the family is moving to-morrow.”

“He ought to be paid for living here.  Where will he go?”

“Oh, people can always find a worse place, if they look long enough.  Canning was in the war, by the way.  He’s got some nervous trouble—­not crazy enough to be taken care of—­just on edge and unstrung.  The war used him up, I reckon, and anxiety and undernourishment used up his wife and children.  It all seems to have come out in the baby—­queerest little kid you ever saw—­born about a year ago.  Mighty funny—­ain’t it?—­the way we let children just a few squares away from us grow up pinched, half-starved, undersized, uneducated, and as little moral as the gutters can make ’em, and all the time we’re parading and begging and even collecting the pennies out of orphan asylums, for the sake of the children on the other side of the world.  But it’s a queer thing, charity, however you happen to look at it.  My father used to say—­and he had as much sense as any man I ever met—­that charity is the greatest traveller under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain’t ever content to stop there over night.”

Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him.  For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities.  This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch!  These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience.  They knew, while he and his kind only imagined.  With a sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation that the thought of the Germans used to bring when he was in the trenches, there swept over him a memory of the social hysteria which had followed, like a mental pestilence or famine, in the track of the war.  The moral platitudes, the sentimental philanthropy, and the hypocritical command of conscience to put all the world, except our own cellars, in order, where were these impulses now in a time which had gone mad with the hatred of work and the craving for pleasure?  Yet he had once thought that he was returning to a world which could be rebuilt on a foundation of justice, and it was this lost belief, he knew, which had made him bitter in spirit and unfair in judgment.