Years and years the little woman had gone on with her work, and she frankly confessed to Edith, one day when they were together going her rounds, that she could see no result from it all. The problem of poverty and helplessness and incapacity seemed to her more hopeless than when she began. There might be a little enlightenment here and there, but there was certainly not less misery. The state of things was worse than she thought at first; but one thing cheered her: the people were better than she thought. They might be dull and suspicious in the mass, but she found so much patience, unselfishness, so many people of good hearts and warm affections. “They are the people,” she said, “I should choose for friends. They are natural, unsophisticated. And do you know,” she went on, “that what most surprises me is the number of reading, thoughtful people among those who do manual labor. I doubt if on your side of town the best books, the real fundamental and abstruse books, are so read and discussed, or the philosophy of life is so seriously considered, as in certain little circles of what you call the working-classes.” “Isn't it all very revolutionary?” asked Edith. “Perhaps,” replied the doctor, dryly. “But they have no more fads than other people. Their theories seem to them not only practical, but they try to apply them to actual legislation; at any rate, they discriminate in vagaries. You would have been amused the other night in a small circle at the lamentations over a member--he was a car-driver--who was the authoritative expositor of Schopenhauer, because he had gone off into Theosophy. It showed such weakness.” “I have heard that the members of that circle were Nihilists.” “The club has not that name, but probably the members would not care to repudiate the title, or deny that they were Nihilists theoretically--that is, if Nihilism means an absolute social and political overturning in order that something better may be built up. And, indeed, if you see what a hopeless tangle our present situation is, where else can the mind logically go?” “It is pitiful enough,” Edith admitted. “But all this movement you speak of seems to me a vague agitation.” “I don't think,” the doctor said, after a moment, “that you appreciate the intellectual force that is in it all, or allow for the fermenting power in the great discontented mass of these radical theories on the problem of life.”