"Yes, her singleness of mind. I could not do it; not only because I should not dare to offer such solace, but also because my sympathy would be too much with them. I should feel, in the case of so many, that their imprisonment was the real offence rather than the so-called crime that took them there, and that would stay my hand. The letter that I should write would be a letter that would never pass the governor's office. Take, for example, a starving man who stole bread, and is in prison for that. It would be too cruel a mockery to comfort him with evangelical maxims. Hunger comes before conduct and far before religion. Another man might be there for debt, which is quite as often the result of accident as turpitude. Another might have merely killed the middle-aged seducer of a child of tender years. It is too difficult. I am too uncertain." "Yes," said Miss Gold. "I am a little like that too; we are too complex for charity, you and I. In all probability we are merely meddling busy-bodies, groping towards what we hope is light, but doing harm by the way." "I agree with you entirely," said Trist, who had been silent for some time. "My suspicion is that no one can do anything for any one; and my belief is that certain persons with soft hearts are doomed to ruin where they would assist. Most of the charitable are wreckers--certainly the cheque-writers are, and certainly I am. I have proved it again and again; but I shall probably go on, since resistance is so difficult and one is usually so much wiser than one's deeds. I will give you an example. I once did such an apparently harmless thing as to give a tailor's assistant a season ticket for Earl's Court. It admitted one only and he could not afford a shilling a night for his wife; he went every night alone; their home life was interrupted and then destroyed, and they have never been happy since. That, of course, was an error on my part. Had I thought a little longer I should have realised that the ticket was putting him, as the saying is, above himself, and have held my hand. "That is one example. I could give you many others," Trist continued, "all of which convince me that I am a danger to society and ought to be locked up for giving money away as surely as any of your kind friend's prisoners are locked up for abstracting it." "This is very terrible," said Miss Gold. "Well, I believe it to be true of myself," Trist said; "others may have better fortune; but for the most part the feckless should be left alone. It sounds brutal, but after my experience you will acquit me of wishing to speak brutally. England, as I said before, is an Old Testament country, and had better be left to it. Christianity meddles." "That means," I said, "not the cessation of charity but the materialisation of it. Manna and quails once more. And a very good thing too." "Certainly," said Miss Gold.