"I don't blame the clergymen," I said. "They have to live. Better, they very properly thought, go on with elemental condemnations than let in the thin end of such a dangerous wedge as imaginative understanding." "The New Testament," said Trist, "will never catch up with the Old in this country. The Old is certainly the best from the point of view of men who have to bring up families. Trade unionism must be very wary, and look ahead." "Why didn't you go on to offer the verses to the Nonconformists?" I asked. "I was discouraged," she said. "That is one of the temptations to which I most easily fall a prey--discouragement. I felt I could not reopen the project." "You might have given it a turn," I said. "For example, in my Chinese book it is written of Wang Kung-i, of the seventh century A.D., that on being asked by the Emperor Kao Tsung to explain the secret of the harmony in which three generations of his family had lived, he wrote the single word 'Forbearance' many times. You might have offered them that anecdote, and entitled it 'A Lesson from a Heathen Land,' and therefore, even if apposite, negligible here. Every one, then, would be pleased." "Of course," said Miss Gold, "money is really the last instrument with which benevolence, charity, altruism, whatever you call it, works; but most of us, being in a hurry, put it first. The first really is thought. I will give you an example of what I call the truest thought for others, and one which to my mind, if not to the Rontgen-rayed eye of a cynical bachelor, really involves self-sacrifice. I have a friend who spends a great deal of her time--how do you think? In writing letters to prisoners in the gaols. They are pious letters, full of appeals to the better nature and reminders of Christ's loving-kindness and the chance that remains to every one. They must, to a large extent, merely reproduce the ordinary solace that is offered by the chaplains and visitors; but this lady writes them herself, very carefully and legibly, and she employs several of her nieces to paint flowers on the top of each piece of note-paper. She is a wealthy and an intellectual woman, and might be much more congenially employed: but she does this because she wants to do something to alleviate the lot of the outcast. It seems to me a very beautiful deed." "How I envy her!" I said. "Envy?"