certain great house. The house stood a
little back from the street, and carpeting was laid down for the softly
shod feet to pass over. Of course there were gathered a small crowd of
lookers-on, pressing as near as they were allowed to come; trying to
catch, if they might, a gleam or a glitter from the glories they could
not approach. I don't know if the contrast struck them, but it struck
me; the contrast between those satin slippers treading the carpet, and
the bare feet standing on the muddy stones; feet that had never known
the touch of a carpet anywhere, nor of anything else either clean or
soft.'

'But those contrasts must be, Mr. Dallas.'

'Must they? Is not something wrong, do you think, when the Duke of
Trefoil eats strawberries all the year long, and my lace-mender, in the
height of the season, perhaps never sees one?--when the duchess sits in
her bower of beauty, with the violets under her feet and the palms over
her head, and the poor in her husband's houses cannot get a flower to
remind them that all the world is not like a London alley? Does not
something within you say that the scales of the social balance might be
a little more evenly adjusted?'

'How are you going to do it?'

'If you do not feel that,' Pitt went on, 'I am afraid that some of the
lower classes do. I said I did not know whether the contrast struck the
people that night, but I do know it did. I heard words and saw looks
that betrayed it. And when the day comes that the poor will know more
and begin to think about these things, I am afraid there will be
trouble.'

'But what can you do?'

'That is exactly what I was going to ask you,' said Pitt, changing his
tone and with a genial smile. 'Take my lace-mender for an example.
These things must be handled in detail, if at all. She is bitter in the
feeling of wrong done her somewhere, bitter to hatred; what can, not
you, but I, do for her, to help her out of it?'

'I should say that is the Duke of Trefoil's business.'

'I leave his business to him. What is mine?'

'You have done something already, I can see, for she makes an exception
of you.'

'I have not done much,' said Pitt gravely. 'What do you think it was?
Her boy was ill; he had met with an accident, and was a thin, pale,
wasted-looking child when I first saw them. I took him a rosebush, in
full flower.'

'Were they so glad of it?'

Pitt was silent a minute.

'It was about as much as I could stand, to see it. Then I got