“For reasons which I hope to make plain to you, Mr. Parr,” Hodder replied, “those people can never be reached, as they ought to be reached, by building that settlement house.  The principle is wrong, the day is past when such things can be done—­in that way.”  He laid an emphasis on these words.  “It is good, I grant you, to care for the babies and children of the poor, it is good to get young women and men out of the dance-halls, to provide innocent amusement, distraction, instruction.  But it is not enough.  It leaves the great, transforming thing in the lives of these people untouched, and it will forever remain untouched so long as a sense of wrong, a continually deepening impression of an unchristian civilization upheld by the Church herself, exists.  Such an undertaking as that settlement house—­I see clearly now—­is a palliation, a poultice applied to one of many sores, a compromise unworthy of the high mission of the Church.  She should go to the root of the disease.  It is her first business to make Christians, who, by amending their own lives, by going out individually and collectively into the life of the nation, will gradually remove these conditions.”

Mr. Parr sat drumming on the table.  Hodder met his look.

“So you, too, have come to it,” he said.

“Have come to what?”

“Socialism.”

Hodder, in the state of clairvoyance in which he now surprisingly found himself, accurately summed up the value and meaning of the banker’s sigh.

“Say, rather,” he replied, “that I have come to Christianity.  We shall never have what is called socialism until there is no longer any necessity for it, until men, of their owe free will, are ready to renounce selfish, personal ambition and power and work for humanity, for the state.”

Mr. Parr’s gesture implied that he cared not by what name the thing was called, but he still appeared strangely, astonishingly calm;—­Hodder, with all his faculties acute, apprehended that he was dangerously calm.  The man who had formerly been his friend was now completely obliterated, and he had the feeling almost of being about to grapple, in mortal combat, with some unknown monster whose tactics and resources were infinite, whose victims had never escaped.  The monster was in Eldon Parr—­that is how it came to him.  The waxy, relentless demon was aroused.  It behooved him, Hodder, to step carefully . . . .

“That is all very fine, Mr. Hodder, very altruistic, very Christian, I’ve no doubt-but the world doesn’t work that way.” (These were the words borne in on Hodder’s consciousness.) “What drives the world is the motive furnished by the right of acquiring and holding property.  If we had a division to-day, the able men would come out on top next year.”

The rector shook his head.  He remembered, at that moment, Horace Bentley.

“What drives the world is a far higher motive, Mr. Parr, the motive with which have been fired the great lights of history, the motive of renunciation and service which is transforming governments, which is gradually making the world a better place in which to live.  And we are seeing men and women imbued with it, rising in ever increasing numbers on every side to-day.”