And he heard Darrow's dry voice complaining because the well-to-do classes still gave to starving orphans across the world.

After all, what was there to choose between the near-sighted and the far-sighted social vision?
How narrow they both appeared and how crooked! Darrow would let all the children of Europe starve as long as their crying did not interfere with the aims of his Federation of Labour; Stephen's sister Julia, with her instinct for imitation and her remote sense of responsibility, would step over the poverty at her door, while she held out her hands, in the latest fashionable gesture of philanthropy, to the orphans in France or Vienna.
And beside them both his mother, who because of her constitutional inability to see anything beyond the family, perceived merely the fact that her own child would be disappointed if the tableaux for the benefit of starving children somewhere did not go off well.

The question, he realized, was not which one of the three points of view was the most admirable, but simply which one served best the ultimate purpose of the race.

Selfishness seemed to have as little as altruism to do with the problem.

Was Corinna, who had failed in philanthropy and chosen beauty, the only wise one among them?
"But children are living in these houses," he said, "and not only living--they are forced to move out because the rent has become so high that they must find a worse place.