“No,” I answered, “I am quite certain that you do not, and that you never will. No man thinks while he acts. The thinking is done long before. And then the action comes of itself. If you always think and feel a certain way, the good, true way, you need not trouble over your actions. They will be right. Do you suppose the man who gives up his life to save another thinks of what he is doing, and why? He is doing what he must. But all his life long he has been thinking in such a way, and living in such a way, that no other action would be possible.” I said again the quotation from St. Augustine: “‘Love God, and do as you please,’ for if you love the good, wholly, you can do only the good. “Remember,” I said, “that if the contagiously sick are not cared for, we shall all be ill; and, just so, starvation, poverty, sin, hurt each one of us, wherever they be, and must be cured for our own sake. Let us get over the self-righteous, sentimentally virtuous feeling which I fear charity has given many people. For that reason I have always disliked the word ‘charity.’” “Yes,” said Ruth, “so have I.” “But the virtuous feeling is very pleasant,” Virginia said. “Hardly,” I answered, “so sane and sound as the pleasant feeling of helping ourselves, all together.” “The word ‘charity,’” said Marian, “comes from a Greek word meaning gratitude, the word ‘charis.’” “I had always thought of it,” I said, “as coming from the Latin ‘carus,’ meaning love. But that is interesting. For gratitude is always a debt paid. And so, I fear, all our charity is a debt partly and never wholly paid. The most that a man can give, being able to give, still leaves him more than his share. And that is why I seldom have the joy untainted, of which Virginia speaks.” Virginia said it made her glad to see people happy because of her. She said: “Once three of us gave a little boy a ten-cent plaything, and it made him so happy we felt as though we had done something fine.” Ruth agreed with me that it was impossible to overcome a feeling of personal guilt at the sight of misery. “You see,” I went on, “that for the rich poverty is as bad as for the poor. Drunkenness and misery ask their price of the rich man.” “Yes,” said Virginia, “for to see poor and drunken people bothers the rich man.” “She is quite right,” I said; “poverty does and must bother the rich man, and that is just why he must get rid of it. Wells, the socialist, once said he dared not let any man be sick or poor or miserable, and bring up sick, poor, miserable children, for he could not tell what man’s grandchild would one day marry his grandchild.” “That is an interesting way of looking at it,” said Marian. “I never thought of that.”