“But people have got to stand alone.  She might as well begin.”

“But she is so young.”

“Yes, I know.  She is in the way of temptation, but so long as she works industriously, and loves her mother, and feels the obligation, which the poor very easily feel, of doing her share for the family, she is not in so much moral danger as other girls of her age who lead idle and self-indulgent lives.  The working-girls of the city learn to protect themselves.”

“And you think this is enough, without any sort of religion—­that this East Side can go on without any spiritual life?”

Ruth Leigh made a gesture of impatience.  In view of the actual struggle for existence she saw around her, this talk seemed like cant.  And she said: 

“I don’t know that anything can go on.  Let me ask you a question, Father Damon.  Do you think there is any more spirituality, any more of the essentials of what you call Christianity, in the society of the other side than there is on the East Side?”

“It is a deep question, this of spirituality,” replied Father Damon, who was in the depths of his proselyting action a democrat and in sympathy with the people, and rated quite at its full value the conventional fashion in religion.  “I shouldn’t like to judge, but there is a great body of Christian men and women in this city who are doing noble work.”

“Yes,” replied the little doctor, bitterly, “trying to save themselves.  How many are trying to save others—­others except the distant and foreign sinners?”

“You surely cannot ignore,” replied the father, still speaking mildly, “the immense amount of charitable work done by the churches!”

“Yes, I know; charity, charity, the condescension of the rich to the poor.  What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms!  If there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and misery and physical wretchedness?  You know what it is, and you know the luxury elsewhere.  And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors and little aid societies—­little palliatives for an awful state of things.  Why, look at it!  Last winter the city authorities hauled off the snow and the refuse from the fashionable avenues, and dumped it down in the already blockaded and filthy side streets, and left us to struggle with the increased pneumonia and diphtheria, and general unsanitary conditions.  And you wonder that the little nihilist groups and labor organizations and associations of agnostics, as you call them, meeting to study political economy and philosophy, say that the existing state of things has got to be overturned violently, if those who have the power and the money continue indifferent.”

“I do not wonder,” replied Father Damon, sadly.  “The world is evil, and I should be as despairing as you are if I did not know there was another life and another world.  I couldn’t bear it.  Nobody could.”