"I mean to take up the work that I have told you of." "But that's folly, Marian!" He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he uttered it, he knew that he had erred. "Folly" is the word that youth most resents. Marian withdrew her hands. "It is strange," she said, "to hear you, of all men, laugh at an attempt to help the poor." "I am not laughing; I'm too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I can't pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can't help these people without training----" "I can get training." "Without knowing them?" "The only way to know them is to go to them." "But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways." He forgot that he had said he would not argue. He used all his power to convince and to persuade; but if there is one human being that cannot be moved from a purpose, it is a young girl with a romantic ideal, smarting under what she conceives to be ridicule, and for the first time tasting what she believes to be the bitter-sweets of sacrifice. Even when the verbal war had been carried into her own house, he could bring no concession from her. If he was helping his neighbors, then he should be all the more anxious that she, as the woman he wanted to be his wife, should have precisely the experience that the settlement would supply her. "Then you mean," he asked, "that you do care--that you care at least a little?" He put out his hands, but she did not seem to see them. "I mean," she answered, "that we must wait." XI UNDER THE LASH It was on the day following her eavesdropping upon Rose that Violet was awakened early--as early as eleven o'clock in the morning--by a sudden cry. The sound was one of some pain and more terror, beginning in the high note of horrified amazement and ending in an attenuating moan of despair. Violet had been living in a highly charged atmosphere: she sat up in bed, sleep immediately banished from her brain. She remained still and listened. She heard Rose's now familiar footstep. She heard a door open and close. She heard that cry frightfully begin again, and then she heard it more frightfully stop in mid-power, cease in abrupt and hideous silence. There came a discreet tapping at her own door. "Are you alone, my dear?" It was the deep, contralto voice of English Evelyn, and, as Violet replied in the affirmative, the woman softly entered.