The bloodless-looking woman who sat uneasily at her own board clutching at a thin fragment of cold dry toast that hung cheerlessly awry in the silver rack, like the last brown leaf to a frosty tree, while she crunched the toast, spoke dryly of the poor; of how 'interesting many of them are;' how when you take the trouble to understand them, you no longer lump them all together in a featureless misery, you realize how significant and varied are their lives. 'Not half as significant and varied as their smells,' said her unchastened sister. 'Oh, you sometimes talk as if you had no heart!' 'The trouble is, I have no stomach. When you've lured me into one of those dingy alleys and that all-pervading greasy smell of poverty comes flooding into my face--well, simply all my most uncharitable feelings rise up in revolt. I want to hold my nose and hide my eyes, and call for the motor-car. Running away isn't fast enough,' she said, with energy and a sudden spark in her golden-brown eye. Mrs. Fox-Moore poised the fat silver jug over her own belated cup, and waited for the thick cream to come out in a slow and grudging gobbet with a heavy plump into the coffee. As she waited, she gently rebuked that fastidiousness in her companion that shrank from contact with the unsavoury and the unfortunate. 'It isn't only my fastidiousness, as you call it, that is offended,' Vida retorted. 'I am penetrated by the hopelessness of what we're doing. It salves my conscience, or _yours_----' Hurriedly she added, '----that's not what you mean to do it for, I _know_, dear--and you're an angel and I'm a mere cumberer of the earth. But when I'm only just "cumbering," I feel less a fraud than when I'm pretending to do good.' 'You needn't pretend.' 'I can't do anything else. To go among your poor makes me feel in my heart that I'm simply flaunting my better fortune.' 'I never saw you flaunting it.' 'Well, I assure you it's when you've got me to go with you on one of your Whitechapel raids that I feel most strongly how outrageous it is that, in addition to all my other advantages, I should buy self-approval by doing some tuppenny-ha'penny service to a toiling, starving fellow-creature.' Mrs. Fox-Moore set down her coffee-cup. 'You mustn't suppose----' she began. 'No, no,' Vida cut her short. 'I don't doubt _your_ motives. I know too well how ready you are to sacrifice yourself. But it does fill me with a kind of rage to see some of those smug Settlement workers, the people that plume themselves on leaving luxurious homes. They don't say how hideously bored they were in them. They are perfectly enchanted at the excitement and importance they get out of going to live among the poor, who don't want them----' 'Oh, my dear Vida!' 'Not a little bit! Well, the _wily_ paupers do, perhaps, for what they can get out of our sort.' Mrs. Fox-Moore cast down her eyes as though convicted by the recollection of some concrete example.