The resident more than suspected that her visitor knew the school books were stolen when buying them, and any attempt to talk upon that subject was evidently considered very rude.

The visitor wished to get out of her trial, and evidently saw no reason why the House should not help her.

The alderman was out of town, so she could not go to him.

After a long conversation the visitor entirely failed to get another point of view and went away grieved and disappointed at a refusal, thinking the resident simply disobliging; wondering, no doubt, why such a mean woman had once been good to her; leaving the resident, on the other hand, utterly baffled and in the state of mind she would have been in, had she brutally insisted that a little child should lift weights too heavy for its undeveloped muscles.
Such a situation brings out the impossibility of substituting a higher ethical standard for a lower one without similarity of experience, but it is not as painful as that illustrated by the following example, in which the highest ethical standard yet attained by the charity recipient is broken down, and the substituted one not in the least understood:-- A certain charity visitor is peculiarly appealed to by the weakness and pathos of forlorn old age.

She is responsible for the well-being of perhaps a dozen old women to whom she sustains a sincerely affectionate and almost filial relation.