f humanity where it slides into, and is one with bestiality? I
could show you one fearful baboon-like woman, whose very face makes
my nerves shudder: could you believe that woman might one day become a
lady, beautiful as yourself, and therefore minister to her? Would you
not be tempted, for the sake of your own comfort, if not for the pride
of your own humanity, to believe that, like untimely blossoms, these
must fall from off the boughs of the tree of life, and come to nothing
at all--a theory that may do for the preacher, but will not do for the
worker: him it would paralyze?--or, still worse, infinitely worse, that
they were doomed, from their birth, to endless ages of a damnation,
filthy as that in which you now found them, and must probably leave
them? If you could come to this, you had better withhold your hand; for
no desire for the betterment of the masses, as they are stupidly called,
can make up for a lack of faith in the individual. If you cannot hope
for them in your heart, your hands cannot reach them to do them good.
They will only hurt them.'

Lady Georgina was still silent. Falconer's eloquence had perhaps made
her ashamed.

'I want you to sit down and count the cost, before you do any mischief
by beginning what you are unfit for. Last week I was compelled more than
once to leave the house where my duty led me, and to sit down upon a
stone in the street, so ill that I was in danger of being led away as
intoxicated, only the policeman happened to know me. Twice I went back
to the room I had left, crowded with human animals, and one of them
at least dying. It was all I could do, and I have tolerable nerve and
tolerable experience.'

A mist was gathering over Lady Georgina's eyes. She confessed it
afterwards to Miss St. John. And through the mist he looked larger than
human.

'And then the time you must spend before you can lay hold upon them
at all, that is with the personal relation which alone is of any real
influence! Our Saviour himself had to be thirty years in the world
before he had footing enough in it to justify him in beginning to teach
publicly: he had been laying the needful foundations all the time. Not
under any circumstances could I consent to make use of you before you
had brought yourself into genuine relations with some of them first.'

'Do you count societies, then, of no use whatever?' Lady Georgina asked,
more to break the awkwardness of her prolonged silence than for any
other r