Some folk are born to charity--such was Cecily Wake; and some, in these modern days at any rate, have charity thrust upon them--such, in the matter of the Melancthon Settlement, was David Winfrith. Problems affected him far more than persons; and though the apparently insoluble problems of London poverty, London overcrowding, and London thriftlessness, had become to him matters full of poignant concern, he gave scarcely a thought to the individuals composing that mass of human beings whose claims upon society he recognized in theory. What thought he did give was extremely distasteful to him, perhaps because he regarded those who now provided these problems as irrevocably condemned and past present help. Winfrith had never cared to join in the actual daily effort made by the small group of educated, refined people, who were the precursors of the many now trying to grapple with a state of things which the thinkers of that time were just beginning to realize. Still, his hard good sense had been of the utmost use to the Settlement, or rather to Mrs. Robinson, during the years which immediately followed her husband's death. But though he had been the terror, and the vigorous chaser-forth, of the sentimental faddist, he had at no time understood the value of that grain of divine folly without which it is difficult to regain those, themselves so foolish, that seem utterly lost. Winfrith had been astonished, and none too well pleased, when he had found that certain of Cecily Wake's innovations, especially a day-nursery where mothers could leave their babies throughout their long working hours, had received the flattery of imitation from several of the new philanthropic centres then beginning to spring up in all the poorer quarters of the town. Cecily was full of the eager constructive ardour of youth, and during the two years spent by her at the Settlement her infectious energy had quickened into life more than one of the paper schemes evolved by Melancthon Robinson. To the girl, in this early, instinctive stage of her life, problems were nothing, individuals everything. The Catholic Church enjoins the duty of personal charity, insisting upon its efficacy, both to those who give and to those who receive, as opposed to that often magnificent impersonal institutional philanthropy so much practised in this country. Thus, Cecily's instinct in this direction had never been checked, and the first sermon to which, as a child, she had listened with attention and understanding had been one in which a Jesuit had insisted on the duty of helping those who cannot, rather than those who can, help themselves.