hopeless kindness of one who almost contemplates taking the veil, and
to whom the things of this world outside of tenements are hollow and
unprofitable. She found a cruel disappointment at first, for the women
of the College Settlement had rules and ideas of their own, and had
seen enthusiasts like herself come into Rivington Street before, and
depart again. She had thought she would nurse the sick and visit the
prisoners on the Island, and bring cleanliness and hope into miserable
lives, but she found that this was the work of women tried in the
service, who understood it, and who made her first serve her
apprenticeship by reading the German Bible to old women whose eyes
were dim, but who were as hopelessly clean and quite as
self-respecting in their way as herself. The heroism and the
self-sacrifice of a Father Damien or a Florence Nightingale were not
for her; older and wiser young women saw to that work with a quiet
matter-of-fact cheerfulness and a common-sense that bewildered her.
And they treated her kindly, but indulgently, as an outsider. It took
her some time to understand this, and she did not confess to herself
without a struggle that she was disappointed in her own usefulness;
but she brought herself to confess it to her friends "uptown," when
she visited that delightful country from which she was self-exiled.
She went there occasionally for an afternoon's rest or to a luncheon
or a particularly attractive dinner, but she always returned to the
Settlement at night, and this threw an additional interest about her
to her friends--an interest of which she was ashamed, for she knew how
little she was really doing, and that her sacrifice was one of
discomfort merely. The good she did now, it was humiliating to
acknowledge, was in no way proportionate to that which her influence
had wrought among people of her own class.

And what made it very hard was that wherever she went they seemed to