"I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck--an experience of mine," she said

abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone

before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors.

He listened intently, and at the end he said: "I understand. But that is

sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not

rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the

moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You

might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it."

"Oh, I _thank_ you!" she gasped. "You don't know what a load you have

lifted from me!"

Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her

heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from

some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the

truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.

"If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it, is, what a

responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so

simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for

doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any

harm, but if _I_ try it--"

"Yes," said the minister, "it is difficult to help others when we cease

to need help ourselves. A" man begins poor, or his father or grandfather

before him--it doesn't matter how far back he begins--and then he is in

accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as

he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when

he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron,

an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his

help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but

a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to

his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong."

"Yes," said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to

question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. "And I

assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I

first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that

I had no idea then that--that--you were speaking from your own experience

when you--you said how working people looked at things. I didn't know that

you had been--that is, that--"




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