Pink and White Tyranny. Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
never did hear of any thing so odd!” said Lillie. “What in the world can you want to take all that trouble for,—go basking over there in the hot sun, and be shut up with a room full of those ill-smelling factory-people? Why, I’m sure it can’t be your duty! I wouldn’t do it for the world. Nothing would tempt me. Why, gracious, John, you might catch small-pox or something!”
“Pooh! Lillie, child, you don’t know any thing about them. They are just as cleanly and respectable as anybody.”
“Oh, well! they may be. But these Irish and Germans and Swedes and Danes, and all that low class, do smell so,—you needn’t tell me, now!—that working-class smell is a thing that can’t be disguised.”
“But, Lillie, these are our people. They are the laborers from whose toils our wealth comes; and we owe them something.”
“Well! you pay them something, don’t you?”
“I mean morally. We owe our efforts to instruct their children, and to elevate and guide them. Lillie, I feel that it is wrong for us to use wealth merely as a means of self-gratification. We ought to labor for those who labor for us. We ought to deny ourselves, and make some sacrifices of ease for their good.”
“You dear old preachy creature!” said Lillie. “How good you must be! But, really, I haven’t the smallest vocation to be a missionary,—not the smallest. I can’t think of any thing that would induce me to take a long, hot ride in the sun, and to sit in that stived-up room with those common creatures.”
John looked grave. “Lillie,” he said, “you shouldn’t speak of any of your fellow-beings in that heartless way.”
“Well now, if you are going to scold me, I’m sure I don’t want to go. I’m sure, if everybody that stays at home, and has comfortable times, Sundays, instead of going out on missions, is heartless, there are a good many heartless people in the world.”
“I beg your pardon, my darling. I didn’t mean, dear, that you were heartless, but that what you said sounded so. I knew you didn’t really mean it. I didn’t ask you, dear, to go to work,—only to be company for me.”
“And I ask you to stay at home, and be company for me. I’m sure it is lonesome enough here, and you are off on business almost all your days; and you might stay with me Sundays. You could hire some poor, pious young man to do all the work over there. There are plenty of them, dear knows, that it would be a real charity to help, and that could preach and pray better than you can, I know. I don’t think a man that is busy all the week ought to work Sundays. It is breaking the Sabbath.”
“But, Lillie, I am interested in my Sunday school. I know all my people, and they know me; and no one else in the world could do for them what I could.”
“Well, I should think you might be interested in me: nobody else can do for me what you can, and I want you to stay with me. That’s just the way with you men: you don’t care any thing about us after you get us.”
“Now, Lillie, darling, you know that isn’t so.”
“It’s just so. You care more for your old missionary work, now, than you do for me. I’m sure I never knew that I’d married a home-missionary.”
“Darling, please, now, don’t laugh at me, and try to make me selfish and worldly. You have such power over me, you ought to be my inspiration.”
“I’ll be your common-sense, John. When you get on stilts, and run benevolence into the ground, I’ll pull you down. Now, I know it must be bad for a man, that has as much as you do to occupy his mind all the week, to go out and work Sundays; and it’s foolish, when you could perfectly well hire somebody else to do it, and stay at home, and have a good time.”
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