"Exactly," he returned. "You haven't yet freed yourself from the pestilent influence of Dickens, though you have much more sense, too, than nine women out of ten. You have blindly followed the belief that you ought to give for your own sake, without thinking whether it was best for the beggar to receive. Dickens's Christmas stories are now breeding their third generation of paupers; and I doubt if we can convince the broad public of the absurdity of his sociology in another half-century. It takes science to solve problems; hysteric emotionalism won't do it." "You don't think all the beggars I saw to-day were humbugs, do you?" she asked. "There isn't one chance in ten that any one of the half-dozen is really in need," he answered; "and probably five out of the six have taken to begging partly out of laziness, and partly because they can beg larger wages than they can earn honestly." "But there was one old man; he must have been forty, at least," urged the girl, "who was positively starving. Why, just as I turned out of Broadway, I saw him spring down to the gutter and pick up a crust of bread and begin to eat it greedily. I felt in my pocket for my purse, of course, but a gentleman had seen it, too, and he went up to the man and talked to him and gave him a five-dollar bill. Now, there was a real case of distress, wasn't it?" Suydam smiled, sadly. "The starving man was about forty, you say? Tall and thin, wasn't he, with a thin, pointed beard, and a mark on his right cheek?" The girl looked at him in wonder. "Why, how did you know?" she cried. "That's Scar-faced Charley," he answered. "And is he a humbug, too?" she asked. "I followed him for two hours one afternoon last week," he explained, "and I saw him pick up that bit of bread and pretend to eat it at least twenty times. When I had him arrested he had more than ten dollars in his pockets." "Well," the young woman declared, "I shall never believe in anybody again." "But I don't see how it is Scar-faced Charley is out to-day," Suydam went on. "We had him sent up for a month only, for the judge was easy with him. If he's out again so soon, I suppose he must have a pull of some sort. Those fellows often have more influence than you would think." "He took me in completely," the girl admitted. "If Scar-faced Charley, as you call him, can act so well, why doesn't he go on the stage and earn an honest living?" "That's the first thing that astonished me when I went to live in the University Settlement last spring, and began to study out these things for myself. I found beggars who were fond of their profession, and who prided themselves on their skill. What are you to do with them? And if you let them ply their trade, how are you going to distinguish them from those who are really in need?" "It is all very puzzling to me," the girl confessed. "Since I've heard you talk, charity doesn't seem half as simple as it used to."