“Yes,” said Jack, slowly, “she’s got the idea that sympathy is better than money; she says she wants to try to understand other people’s lives.”

“Goodness knows, I’d like to understand my own.”

“And were you trying, Mr. Delancy, to persuade Miss Tavish into that sort of charity?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Jack; “I was trying to interest the East End in something, for the benefit of Miss Tavish.”

“You’ll find that’s one of the most expensive remarks you ever made,” retorted Miss Tavish, rising to go.

“I wish Lily Tavish would marry,” said Mrs. Trafton, watching the girl’s slender figure as it passed through the portiere; “she doesn’t know what to do with herself.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders.  “Yes, she’d be a lovely wife for somebody;” and then he added, as if reminiscently, “if he could afford it.  Good-by.”

“That’s just a fashion of talking.  I never knew a time when so many people afforded to do what they wanted to do.  But you men are all alike.  Good-by.”

When Jack reached home it was only a little after six o’clock, and as they were not to go out to dine till eight, he had a good hour to rest from the fatigues of the day, and run over the evening papers and dip into the foreign periodicals to catch a topic or two for the dinner-table.

“Yes, sir,” said the maid, “Mrs. Delancy came in an hour ago.”

IV

Edith’s day had been as busy as Jack’s, notwithstanding she had put aside several things that demanded her attention.  She denied herself the morning attendance on the Literature Class that was raking over the eighteenth century.  This week Swift was to be arraigned.  The last time when Edith was present it was Steele.  The judgment, on the whole, had been favorable, and there had been a little stir of tenderness among the bonnets over Thackeray’s comments on the Christian soldier.  It seemed to bring him near to them.  “Poor Dick Steele!” said the essayist.  Edith declared afterwards that the large woman who sat next to her, Mrs. Jerry Hollowell, whispered to her that she always thought his name was Bessemer; but this was, no doubt, a pleasantry.  It was a beautiful essay, and so stimulating!  And then there was bouillon, and time to look about at the toilets.  Poor Steele, it would have cheered his life to know that a century after his death so many beautiful women, so exquisitely dressed, would have been concerning themselves about him.  The function lasted two hours.  Edith made a little calculation.  In five minutes she could have got from the encyclopaedia all the facts in the essay, and while her maid was doing her hair she could have read five times as much of Steele as the essayist read.  And, somehow, she was not stimulated, for the impression seemed to prevail that now Steele was disposed of.  And she had her doubts whether literature would, after all, prove to be a permanent social distraction.  But Edith may have been too severe in her judgment.  There was probably not a woman in the class that day who did not go away with the knowledge that Steele was an author, and that he lived in the eighteenth century.  The hope for the country is in the diffusion of knowledge.