She could not wholly restrain a little air of vexation as she gave him her hand. "Of course I'm glad. But I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you if you've come to go home with me. I've promised to make a call--in the neighbourhood. Of course you can walk with me there, if you like." "Oh, the neighbourhood!" He gave a humorous groan of mock complaint, but down in his heart the complaint was very real. The neighbourhood was coming too often between her and his desire to be with her. "Very well. I'll take what I can get." She threw her sable scarf about her throat and they stepped forth into the narrow street, paved with new snow that the day had trodden to a dirty glaze. He had talked with her before about his ambitions, for his future had been part of his offering when he had offered himself. He now told her that he had just been appointed chief counsel of the committee of the legislature for investigating impure foods. She knew how great a distinction this was, how great a token of the future, and she congratulated him warmly. "If these good things you see really do come, you know I don't want to share them alone," he said in a low voice, when she had finished. She shook her head slowly. "The more I think, the more I see how unsuited I am for you. Our ideas are so different. You face one pole, I another. We would never pull together; we could only achieve the deadlock of two joined forces that struggle in opposite directions." "But you know my hope is that we shall not always face in opposite directions." She turned upon him a smile that was touched with irony. "You mean you expect some day to look toward my pole?" He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "You know I mean you will some day see the futility of such work as you are doing, and the wrongness of many of your ideas--and then you will turn to the true pole." "Your pole? No. I do not believe, as you do, that only the fit should survive. I do not believe, as you do, that the hard conditions of life are necessary as a kind of sieve, or a kind of civil service examination, to separate the fit from the unfit. I do not believe, as you do, that the great mass who have failed to pass the meshes of this test, who are down, have by the mere fact of their being down proved their unfitness, shown that they are worthy to be neglected. Your belief, summed up, is that the world is made for the strong--for the rich man born to opportunities, and for the poor man born with the superior brains and energy to create them. To that belief I can never come. I believe the world is made also for the weak. Rather, I believe all should be made strong." With a sweep of her hand she indicated the two rows of tenements whose dingy red walls stretched away and away till they and the narrow street disappeared into the wintry twilight.