ts Eleanor had set the
girls to work.

"The poor things!" she said to Margery, sympathetically. "What they need
most of all is courage to pick up again, now that everything seems to
have come to an end for them, and make a new start. And I can't imagine
anything harder than that!"

"Why, it's dreadful!" said Margery. "She seems to have lost all
ambition--to be ready to let things go."

"That's just the worst of it," said Eleanor. "And it's in making them
see that there's still hope and cheer and good friendship in the world
that we can help them most. I do think we can be of some practical use
to them, too, but the main thing is to brace them up, and make them want
to be busy helping themselves. It would be so easy for me to give them
the money to start over again or I could get my friends to come in with
me, and make up the money, if I couldn't do it all myself."

"But they ought to do it for themselves, you mean?"

"Yes. They'll really be ever so much better off in the long run if it's
managed that way. Often and often, in the city, I've heard the people
who work in the charity organizations tell about families that were
quite ruined because they were helped too much."

"I can see how that would be," said Margery. "They would get into the
habit of thinking they couldn't do anything for themselves--that they
could turn to someone else whenever they got into trouble."

"Yes. You see these poor people are in the most awful sort of trouble
now. They're discouraged and hopeless. Well, the thing to do is to make
them understand that they can rise superior to their troubles, that they
can build a new home on the ashes of their old one."

"Oh, I think it will be splendid if we can help them to do that!"

"They'll feel better, physically, as soon as they have had a good
dinner, Margery. Often and often people don't think enough about that.
It's when people feel worst that they ought to be fed best. It's
impossible to be cheerful on an empty stomach. When people are well
nourished their troubles never seem so great. They look on the bright
side and they tell themselves that maybe things aren't as bad as they
look."

"How can we help them otherwise, though!"

"Oh, we'll fix up a place where they can sleep to-night, for one thing.
And we'll help them to start clearing away all the rubbish. They've got
to have a new house, of course, and they can't even start work on that
until all this wreckage is cleared away."

"