“Show Mr. Spears your work, Alice; he will like that better. Everybody is severe now upon these poor abandoned Berlin wools. Now, Mr. Spears, that pattern came from the School of Art Needlework. It was drawn by somebody very distinguished indeed. It is intended to elevate the mind as well as to occupy the fingers. You cannot but be pleased with that.” “What is it for?” said the critic. “I--scarcely know; for a screen I think--part of a screen you know, Mr. Spears, to keep off the fire----” “Ah!--no, I don’t know. Among the people I belong to, Miss Alice, there is no need of expedients to keep off the fire. Sometimes there is no fire to have even a look at. I’ve known poor creatures wandering into the streets when the gas was lighted, because it was warm there. The gas in the shop-windows was all the fire they had a chance of. Did you ever see a little wretched room all black of a winter’s night? Black--there’s no blackness like that; it is blacker than the crape you all put on when your people die.” “No; she has never seen it,” cried Lady Markham. “I did once in our village at home before I was married. Oh, Mr. Spears, I know! it made me cold for years after. No, thank God, Alice has never seen it. We take care there is nothing like that here----. But,” she added after a pause--“I don’t like to say anything unkind; but, Mr. Spears, after all, it was their own fault.” “Ah, my lady! you that make screens to keep off the fire, do you never do what is wrong? you that are cushioned at every angle, and never know what a hard seat is, or a hard-bed, or a harsh look, or a nip of frost, or a pinch of hunger--do you always do what is right? You ought to. You are like angels, with everything beautiful round you; and you look like angels, and you ought to be what they are said to be; but, if instead of all this pretty nonsense you had misery and toil around you, and ugliness, and discord, and quarrelling, would it be wonderful if you went astray sometimes, and gave the other people, the warm, wealthy, well-clothed people, reason to say it was your own fault? Great God!” cried the orator, jumping up. “Why should we be sitting here in this luxury, with everything that caprice can want, and waste our lives working impossible flowers upon linen rags, while they are starving, and perishing, and sinning for want, trying for the hardest work, and not getting it? Why should there be such differences in life?” “This is not a place to ask such a question, Spears,” said Paul. “You forget that we are the very people who are taking the bread out of the mouths of our brothers. We, and such as we----”