"Perhaps he _is_ cold," said the doctor.
"But has he any _right_ to be so?" retorted Annie, with certainly no
coldness of her own.
"Well, I don't know. I never thought of the right or wrong of a man's being
what he was born. Perhaps we might justly blame his ancestors."
Annie broke into a laugh at herself: "Of course. But don't you think that
a man who is able to put things as he does--who can make you see, for
example, the stupidity and cruelty of things that always seemed right and
proper before--don't you think that he's guilty of a kind of hypocrisy if
he doesn't _feel_ as well as see?"
"No, I can't say that I do," said the doctor, with pleasure in the feminine
excess of her demand. "And there are so many ways of feeling. We're apt to
think that our own way is the only way, of course; but I suppose that most
philanthropists--men who have done the most to better conditions--have been
people of cold temperaments; and yet you can't say they are unfeeling."
"No, certainly. Do you think Mr. Peck is a real philanthropist?"
"How you do get back to the personal always!" said Dr. Morrell. "What makes
you ask?"
"Because I can't understand his indifference to his child. It seems to me
that real philanthropy would begin at home. But twice he has distinctly
forgotten her existence, and he always seems bored with it. Or not that
quite; but she seems no more to him than any other child."
"There's something very curious about all that," said the doctor. "In most
things the greater includes the less, but in philanthropy it seems to
exclude it. If a man's heart is open to the whole world, to all men, it's
shut sometimes against the individual, even the nearest and dearest. You
see I'm willing to admit all you can say against a rival practitioner."
"Oh, I understand," said Annie. "But I'm not going to gratify your spite."
At the same time she tacitly consented to the slight for Mr. Peck which
their joking about him involved. In such cases we excuse our disloyalty as
merely temporary, and intend to turn serious again and make full amends for
it. "He made very short work," she continued, "of that notion of yours that
there could be any good feeling between the poor and the rich who had once
been poor themselves."