Mighty funny--ain't it ?--the way we let children just a few squares away from us grow up pinched, half-starved, undersized, uneducated, and as little moral as the gutters can make 'em, and all the time we're parading and begging and even collecting the pennies out of orphan asylums, for the sake of the children on the other side of the world.

But it's a queer thing, charity, however you happen to look at it.

My father used to say--and he had as much sense as any man I ever met--that charity is the greatest traveller under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain't ever content to stop there over night." Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him.

For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities.
This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience.

They knew, while he and his kind only imagined.