"Thank you, Doctor," murmured Mrs. Budd. "I'm sure he don't deserve your kindness; but he knows he----"
"Here's your letter," stated Doctor Brink. "If you stop here any longer I shall choke you. Go away."
And, looking very puzzled, Mrs. Budd departed.
The Hon. Mrs. Strudwicke-Moses came to tea with Doctor Brink the other day, your servant being in attendance. The Hon. Mrs. Strudwicke-Moses derives from beer; but she has a reputation for benevolence, wisdom, and the party virtues which is envied even by cocoa.
Doctor Brink, finding the minutes between "calls" hang heavy on his hands, has devoted them of late to organising a sort of small relief fund, from which he provides the most thriftless and improvident and least meritorious of his patients with milk and coal and flour.
"It is rank charity, of course," the doctor has had grace to admit--"charity of the filthiest description. But we do flatter ourselves that our little effort is free from the deadly sin of 'overlapping.' There isn't a really deserving case on our list."
The Hon. Mrs. Strudwicke-Moses had received an early invitation to assist this fund, and had lost no time in doing so, the doctor having intimated that cocoa had also competed. And now the honourable lady was come to take tea.
"I cannot tell you," she said, "how much I admire the quiet, unostentatious, truly Christian heroism of you East End doctors. It may truly be said of you that you give your all."
"Well, look at you!" responded Mrs. Strudwicke-Moses. "Here you are, in voluntary exile, living amid filth and squalor, denying yourself every luxury, even that of fresh air, in order to devote yourself to alleviating the sufferings of our neglected poor."
"Not at all," responded his visitor. "Compare yourself with any even of our most eminent philanthropists. They only supply the poor with money--they merely give of their abundance. Now you, and men like you (pardon my mentioning it, but I cannot help pointing this out to you) you give _yourselves_. You actually see and touch the poor things, even the most unpleasant of them."
"That's true," admitted Doctor Brink, with the respectful air of one who has been introduced to a new and important truth. "But," he added, "they jolly well pay me for it."