not altogether fair. She is reminded of a college friend of hers, who
told her that she was not going to allow her literary husband to write
unworthy potboilers for the sake of earning a living. "I insist that we
shall live within my own income; that he shall not publish until he is
ready, and can give his genuine message." The charity visitor recalls
what she has heard of another acquaintance, who urged her husband to
decline a lucrative position as a railroad attorney, because she wished
him to be free to take municipal positions, and handle public questions
without the inevitable suspicion which unaccountably attaches itself in
a corrupt city to a corporation attorney. The action of these two women
seemed noble to her, but in their cases they merely lived on a lesser
income. In the case of the workingman's wife, she faced living on no
income at all, or on the precarious one which she might be able to get
together.

She sees that this third woman has made the greatest sacrifice, and she
is utterly unwilling to condemn her while praising the friends of her
own social position. She realizes, of course, that the situation is
changed by the fact that the third family needs charity, while the other
two do not; but, after all, they have not asked for it, and their plight
was only discovered through an accident to one of the children. The
charity visitor has been taught that her mission is to preserve the
finest traits to be found in her visited family, and she shrinks from
the thought of convincing the wife that her husband is worthless and she
suspects that she might turn all this beautiful devotion into
complaining drudgery. To be sure, she could give up visiting the family
altogether, but she has become much interested in the progress of the
crippled child who eagerly anticipates her visits, and she also suspects
that she will never know many finer women than the mother. She is
unwilling, therefore, to give up the friendship, and goes on bearing her