“Are things any worse than in any other manufacturing city?” asked Ditmar.

“That isn’t the point,” said Siddons.  “The point is that they’re bad, they’re dangerous, they’re inhuman.  If you could go into these tenements as I have done and see the way some of these people live, it would make you sick the Poles and Lithuanians and Italians especially.  You wouldn’t treat cattle that way.  In some households of five rooms, including the kitchen, I found as many as fourteen, fifteen, and once seventeen people living.  You’ve got an alarming infant death-rate.”

“Isn’t it because these people want to live that way?” Ditmar inquired.  “They actually like it, they wouldn’t be happy in anything but a pig-sty—­they had ’em in Europe.  And what do you expect us to do?  Buy land and build flats for them?  Inside of a month they’d have all the woodwork stripped off for kindling, the drainage stopped up, the bathtubs filled with ashes.  I know, because it’s been tried.”

Tilted back in his chair, he blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, and his eyes sought Janet’s.  She avoided them, resenting a little the assumption of approval she read in them.  Her mind, sensitive to new ideas, had been keenly stimulated as she listened to Siddons, who began patiently to dwell once more on the ill effect of the conditions he had discovered on the welfare of the entire community.  She had never thought of this.  She was surprised that Ditmar should seem to belittle it.  Siddons was a new type in her experience.  She could understand and to a certain extent maliciously enjoy Ditmar’s growing exasperation with him; he had a formal, precise manner of talking, as though he spent most of his time presenting cases in committees:  and in warding off Ditmar’s objections he was forever indulging in such maddening phrases as, “Before we come to that, let me say a word just here.”  Ditmar hated words.  His outbursts, his efforts to stop the flow of them were not unlike the futile charges of a large and powerful animal harassed by a smaller and more agile one.  With nimble politeness, with an exasperating air of deference to Ditmar’s opinions, Mr. Siddons gave ground, only to return to the charge; yet, despite a manner and method which, when contrasted to Ditmar’s, verged on the ludicrous, Mr. Siddons had a force and fire of his own, nervous, almost fanatical:  when he dwelt on the misery he had seen, and his voice trembled from the intensity of his feeling, Janet began to be moved.  It was odd, considering the struggle for existence of her own family, that these foreigners had remained outside the range of her sympathy.

“I guess you’ll find,” Ditmar had interrupted peremptorily, “I guess you’ll find, if you look up the savings banks statistics, these people have got millions tucked away.  And they send a lot of it to the other side, they go back themselves, and though they live like cattle, they manage to buy land.  Ask the real estate men.  Why, I could show you a dozen who worked in the mills a few years ago and are capitalists to-day.”