Like this:
She hated the charity, but Tom would just shrug it off and tell her if people didn’t help each other out now and then, what good was living?
Answer
The crucial signal for deciding whether a sentence like the one the OP provides should end with a question mark or with a period is in the way the narrator of the reported conversation frames the remark that (presumably) was a question in the actual conversation. Consider, for example, an episode described in almost the same words that the OP’s example uses:
She hated the charity, but Tom would just shrug it off and say if people didn’t help each other out now and then, what good was living?
The question Tom asked in the original conversation, we may guess, was something like this:
If people don’t help each other out now and then, what good is living?
And the revised wording in this part of the sentence remains syntactically unchanged:
If people didn’t help each other out now and then, what good was living?
The wording Tom used in the original question is being reported (without quotation marks) with only two changes: don’t for didn’t, and is for was. Both of these adjustments reflect the fact that the person reporting the conversation is reporting it as a past event. Most significantly, the wording as reported preserves the original question’s structure of “If X, what Y is Z?” It looks like a question because it is still framed as a question—so it’s reasonable to punctuate it with a question mark.
But now consider a wording change to this:
She hated the charity, but Tom would just shrug it off and ask what the good of living was if people didn’t help each other out now and then.
The original question that this wording reports is the same as before:
If people don’t help each other out now and then, what good is living?
and the actual words differ only in the don’t-for-didn’t and is-for-was exchanges, plus a switch from say to ask and a switch from “good was living” to “the good of living was.” But the structure of the sentence is fundamentally different thanks to this last change: It now describes the gist of Tom’s question without adopting the syntactical form of a question. As a result, adding a question mark to the end of the phrase
What the good of living was if people didn’t help each other out now and then?
seems unwise. The wording, taken by itself, doesn’t mimic the form of a normal syntactical question; and as a result, the question mark, instead of signaling the end of a recognizable question, seems to function at cross purposes to the declarative form of that part of the sentence.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Andrew Lowe , Answer Author : Sven Yargs
