I was silly, foolish, quixotic to hope that here, in this little world of workaday people, he might be brought to see that personal acquisition and advance is not enough to give life meaning, to justify what it exacts.  I was foolish.  We are more apart than when I came.

Mrs. Mundy, in her blue cotton dress, a band of embroidery in the neck of its close-fitting basque, and around her waist a long, white apron which reached beyond her ample hips to the middle of her back, lingered this morning, dust-cloth in hand, at the door of my sitting-room.  There was something else she wanted to say.

“I’m mighty ’fraid little Gertie Archer is going to have what we used to call a galloping case.”  She went over to the window, where she felt the earth in its flower-box to see if it were moist.  “She’s a pretty child, and she was terrible anxious to go to one of them open-air schools on the roof, but there wasn’t any room.  It’s too late now.”

The upper ends of the dust-cloth were fitted together carefully, and, leaving the window, Mrs. Mundy went over to the door.  “Do you reckon the women know, the women where you come from?  And the other women, the rich, and the comfortable, and the plain ones who could help, too, if they were shown how—­do you reckon they know?”

I looked up from the table where I had been straightening some magazines.  “Know what?”

“About there not being schools enough for the children, and about boys and girls going wrong because of not being shown how to go right, and about—­”

Mrs. Mundy sat down in a chair near the door.  “Another thing I want to ask you is this:  How did it come about that some men and women have found out they’ve got to know, and they’ve got to care, and they’ve got to help with things they didn’t use to help with; and some ’ain’t heard a sound, ’ain’t seen a thing of what’s going on around them?

“Some people like being deaf and blind.  But most people are willing to do their part if they only understand it.  The trouble is in knowing how to go about things in the right way—­the wise way.  Women have had to stumble so long—­

“They’re natural stumblers—­women are.  That is, some of ’em.  They’re afraid to look where they’re going.  I don’t like to lose heart in anything human, but I get low down in spirit when I see how don’t-care so many women are.  They’re blind as bats when they don’t want to see, and they’ve got a mighty satisfying way of soothing of themselves by saying some things ain’t their business.  That’s devil’s dope.  Generally women who talk that way are the ones who call the most attention to the faults and failings of men.  Considering men are men, I think they do wonderful.  Mr. Guard says if women keep silent much longer the very stones will cry out.”

“Mr. Guard?  Is he the one you call the people’s preacher?”

Mrs. Mundy nodded.  “He preaches to them what won’t go in a church.  I reckon you’ve seen something about him in the papers.  He used to have a church in a big city, but he gave it up.  I don’t think he thinks like the churches think, exactly, but he don’t have any call to mention creeds and doctrines down here, and he just asks people plain out what kind of life they’re living, not what they believe.  I’ve been wanting for a long time for you-all to know each other.”