Before Stephen’s gaze there passed a vision of the dingy basement room, the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of pre-natal experience and disillusionment.  And he heard Darrow’s dry voice complaining because the well-to-do classes still gave to starving orphans across the world.  After all, what was there to choose between the near-sighted and the far-sighted social vision?  How narrow they both appeared and how crooked!  Darrow would let all the children of Europe starve as long as their crying did not interfere with the aims of his Federation of Labour; Stephen’s sister Julia, with her instinct for imitation and her remote sense of responsibility, would step over the poverty at her door, while she held out her hands, in the latest fashionable gesture of philanthropy, to the orphans in France or Vienna.  And beside them both his mother, who because of her constitutional inability to see anything beyond the family, perceived merely the fact that her own child would be disappointed if the tableaux for the benefit of starving children somewhere did not go off well.  The question, he realized, was not which one of the three points of view was the most admirable, but simply which one served best the ultimate purpose of the race.  Selfishness seemed to have as little as altruism to do with the problem.  Was Corinna, who had failed in philanthropy and chosen beauty, the only wise one among them?

“But children are living in these houses,” he said, “and not only living—­they are forced to move out because the rent has become so high that they must find a worse place.  I’ve just seen it with my own eyes.  Three sickly little children and a dreadful baby—­a baby that knows everything already.”

A quiver of pain crossed Mr. Culpeper’s handsome features; but he said only, “I will speak to the agent.”

“Won’t you look into it yourself?” asked Stephen hopelessly.  “The agent is only the agent—­but the responsibility is yours—­ours.  Of course the agent doesn’t want to make expensive repairs when he can get as high rent without doing so.  He knows that people are obliged to have a roof over them; and if the roofs are too bad for white people, he can always find negroes to pay anything that he asks.  Can’t you see what it is in reality—­that we are preying on the helpless?”

Turning suddenly from the mirror, Mrs. Culpeper crossed the floor hastily and put her arms about her son’s shoulders.  Her face was very motherly and there was a compassionate light in her eyes, “My dear, dear boy,” she murmured in the soothing tone that one uses to the ill or the mentally unbalanced.  “My dear boy, you must really go and dress.  Julia will never forgive us.”  In her heart she was sincerely grieved by what he had told her.  She would have helped cheerfully if it had been possible