throng in the streets-buyers and sellers and idlers.  To most this outdoor life was a great enjoyment, and to them the unclean streets with the odors and exhalations of decay were homelike and congenial.  Nor did they seem surprised that a new country should so completely reproduce the evil smells and nastiness of the old civilization.  It was all familiar and picturesque.  Work still went on in the crowded tenement-houses, and sickness simply changed its character, death showing an increased friendliness to young children.  Some impression was of course made by the agents of various charities, the guilds and settlements bravely strove at their posts, some of the churches kept their flags flying on the borders of the industrial districts, the Good Samaritans of the Fresh-air Fund were active, the public dispensaries did a thriving business, and the little band of self-sacrificing doctors, most of them women, went their rounds among the poor, the sick, and the friendless.

Among them Ruth Leigh was one who never took a vacation.  There was no time for it.  The greater the heat, the more noisome the town, the more people became ill from decaying food and bad air and bad habits, the more people were hungry from improvidence or lack of work, the more were her daily visits a necessity; and though she was weary of her monotonous work, and heart-sick at its small result in such a mass, there never came a day when she could quit it.  She made no reputation in her profession by this course; perhaps she awoke little gratitude from those she served, and certainly had not so much of their confidence as the quacks who imposed upon them and took their money; and she was not heartened much by hope of anything better in this world or any other; and as for pay, if there was enough of that to clothe her decently, she apparently did not spend it on herself.

It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not even notoriety.  Did she love these people?  She did not ever say anything about that.  In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little clubs for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure to attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any religion of humanity.  Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of these people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there was nothing for her to do but to give herself to them.  She would probably have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic bitterness in her reply.  When she thought of it the condition seemed to her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so pharisaical.  If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass of humanity is concerned.