Here was a man who had left all and followed his Master; not as a missionary sent out by a society, with all the prestige and protection of his Church behind him, but who went forth to save his own soul and aid his brother man. This was devotion, true self-sacrifice, of which this age seems almost to have lost the idea. One cannot give a cup of cold water now-a-days to a thirsty child unless at the bidding of a committee. Our charity is done to order and by deputy. Elsworth's way of going to work was like that of an early Christian, and savoured of real heroism; and women love heroes, because every woman has the germ of heroism in her own heart, and self-sacrifice is of her nature.
Mildred had found her ideal man. They talked of many things, but most of his hospital down in the city, and the next day they all went to see it, and many other of the charitable agencies of the town.
Of course Mr. Crowe was huffy and upset at the meeting, and at the reception which the ladies gave to the handsome young fellow whom they had discovered. He was jealous, too; for Mildred did not conceal the interest she felt in all that was shown her, and Mr. Crowe could not scoff down the good works of which he had evidence that day, though he tried hard to make game of any attempt to Christianize the gipsies, and protested it was a great pity to waste so many opportunities of investigating cholera germs and inoculations in such a favourable field.
Mildred set him down when he spoke contemptuously of Elsworth's Gitano friends.
"Now, Mr. Crowe, you surprise me, as a deep student of natural phenomena, to hear you talk so. Don't you know--
'No creature's made so mean But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate, Its supreme worth'?"
Mr. Crowe did not think the game was worth the candle; besides, it would spoil the artists' chances to civilize the gipsies.
Elsworth explained that had he attempted to experiment with the cholera patients, if he had been so inclined, he would have fared no better than the native doctors, who were suspected of propagating the disease for the Government, who wished to deplete the population.
"Yes," said Aunt Janet, "can we wonder at the poor Neapolitans and Spaniards, in the late cholera epidemics, attacking the doctors with sticks and stones, declaring they were spreading the disease--as, in fact, they were--by these abominable vaccinations?"