had only one criticism of institutional work, that in his
observation it did not bring the people whom it reached into the Church
in any great numbers. Perhaps that were too much to ask, in these days.
For his part he would willingly assume the extra burden, and he was
far from denying the positive good such work accomplished through
association and by the raising of standards.

Mr. Ferguson declared his readiness to help. Many of his salesgirls,
he said, lived in this part of the city, and he would be glad to do
anything in his power towards keeping them out of the dance-halls and
such places.

A committee was finally appointed consisting of Mr. Parr, Mr. Atterbury,
and the rector, to consult architects and to decide upon a site.

Hodder began a correspondence with experts in other cities,
collected plans, pamphlets, statistics; spent hours with the great
child-specialist, Dr. Jarvis, and with certain clergymen who believed in
institutionalism as the hope of the future.

But McCrae was provokingly non-committal.

"Oh, they may try it," he assented somewhat grudgingly, one day when the
rector had laid out for his inspection the architects' sketch for the
settlement house. "No doubt it will help many poor bodies along."

"Is there anything else?" the rector asked, looking searchingly at his
assistant.

"It may as well be that," replied McCrae.

The suspicion began to dawn on Hodder that the Scotch man's ideals were
as high as his own. Both of them, secretly, regarded the new scheme as a
compromise, a yielding to the inevitable....

Mr. Ferguson's remark that an enlarged parish house and a new settlement
house might help to keep some of the young women employed in his
department store out of the dance-halls interested Hodder, who conceived
the idea of a dance-hall of their own. For the rector, in the course of
his bachelor shopping, often resorted to the emporium of his vestryman,
to stand on the stairway which carried him upward without lifting his
feet, to roam, fascinated, through the mazes of its aisles, where he
invariably got lost, and was rescued by suave floor-walkers or pert
young women in black gowns and white collars and cuffs. But they were
not all pert--there were many characters, many types. And he often
wondered whether they did not get tired standing on their feet all day
long, hesitating to ask them; speculated on their lives--flung as most
of them were on a heedless city, and left to shift for