nded,'
Vida retorted. 'I am penetrated by the hopelessness of what we're doing.
It salves my conscience, or _yours_----' Hurriedly she added,
'----that's not what you mean to do it for, I _know_, dear--and you're
an angel and I'm a mere cumberer of the earth. But when I'm only just
"cumbering," I feel less a fraud than when I'm pretending to do good.'

'You needn't pretend.'

'I can't do anything else. To go among your poor makes me feel in my
heart that I'm simply flaunting my better fortune.'

'I never saw you flaunting it.'

'Well, I assure you it's when you've got me to go with you on one of
your Whitechapel raids that I feel most strongly how outrageous it is
that, in addition to all my other advantages, I should buy self-approval
by doing some tuppenny-ha'penny service to a toiling, starving
fellow-creature.'

Mrs. Fox-Moore set down her coffee-cup. 'You mustn't suppose----' she
began.

'No, no,' Vida cut her short. 'I don't doubt _your_ motives. I know too
well how ready you are to sacrifice yourself. But it does fill me with a
kind of rage to see some of those smug Settlement workers, the people
that plume themselves on leaving luxurious homes. They don't say how
hideously bored they were in them. They are perfectly enchanted at the
excitement and importance they get out of going to live among the poor,
who don't want them----'

'Oh, my dear Vida!'

'Not a little bit! Well, the _wily_ paupers do, perhaps, for what they
can get out of our sort.'

Mrs. Fox-Moore cast down her eyes as though convicted by the
recollection of some concrete example.

'We're only scratching at the surface,' Vida, said--'such an ugly
surface, too! And the more we scratch, the uglier things come to light.'

'You make too much of that disappointment at Christmas.'

'I wasn't even thinking of the hundredth time you've been
disillusioned.' Vida threw down her table napkin, and stood up. 'I was
thinking of people like our young parson cousin.'

'George----'

Vida made a shrug of half-impatient, half-humorous assent. 'Leaves the
Bishop's Palace and comes to London. He, too, wants "to live for the
poor." Never for an instant one of them. Always the patron--the person
something may be got out of--or, at all events, hoped from.'

She seemed to be about to leave the room, but as her sister answered
with some feeling, 'No, no, they love and respect him!' Vida paused, and
brought up by the fire that the sudden cold made comforti