It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so
dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests
of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for
it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose
co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the
other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised
her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still
more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called
herself; some who knew of the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered
what must always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of
our democracy--an indifference and an incredulity concerning the feelings
of people of lower station which could not be surpassed in another
civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated as a great trial for
Miss Kilburn; but the mother's bereavement was regarded as something those
people were used to, and got over more easily than one could imagine.
Annie's mission took her to the ministers of the various denominations, and
she was able to overcome any scruples they might have about the theatricals
by urging the excellence of their object. As a Unitarian, she was not
prepared for the liberality with which the matter was considered; the
Episcopalians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister
himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist preacher, who
volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the Baptist church, and
help present the affair in the right light; she had expected a degree of
narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which her sect learned to attribute to
others in the militant period before they had imbibed so much of its own
tolerance.
But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach
in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with
the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him,
and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own
position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the
best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw
him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance
and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her
fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of
the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but
she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had
none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her;
but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed
characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange
pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own
people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him,
but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and
even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added
to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon
as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the
mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care
for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of
having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she
added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them
apart.