“It seems to me,” said one speaker, “that we ought to be careful about talking or even allowing ourselves to think of those whom we call the ‘lower classes’ as being essentially different from ourselves. They are ignorant, of course, and dreadfully shiftless, some of them, but they have the same instincts and affections as we, and I for one respect their individuality and their privacy as I would our own. I shouldn’t like to ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself under similar circumstances. If _we_ aren’t ready for coöperation, how can we expect them to be?” “I ask nothing of any one,” replied Mildred, “which I would not be glad to do myself under the same conditions, or under better conditions. We are learning to coöperate in a thousand ways of which our grandfathers never dreamed. Under the pressure of new duties and interests which our age has brought with it, we are learning to eliminate useless individual work where combined work is better. The law of reciprocity is the divine law. Wasteful individual effort belongs to the age of savagery. Communism, the mingling of families, and absence of personal privacy can never I am convinced be tolerated by civilized people; but coöperation with one’s fellows in harnessing up the forces of nature to subserve our material interests and leave man more free for the development of his higher nature, seems to me the only rational thing for rational beings. Any reluctance to see and accept this seems to me the result of prejudice.” “I should put it even a little stronger than that,” said Professor Adler, gently. “Under every objection which has been presented to me by the friends with whom I have for years been laboring in this very line of effort, I have felt that there was not mere prejudice but a real, unconscious selfishness. All objections like the one you mention are mere matters of detail which could be properly adjusted, and the freedom of the wife from all petty details that eat up the greater part of her life ought to more than compensate for the slight sacrifice of feeling involved in doing an unaccustomed thing. I believe that we shall gradually come to it; and meanwhile our boarding-houses and hotels will shelter larger and larger numbers of women driven from housekeeping by the weight of domestic cares. They will have lost their home in losing their cook!” CHAPTER IX. FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL.