Had she been allowed by a common
fellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and to
know their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when he
was a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten in
the face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with life
she would have been splendid.
She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch of
something like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mob
of defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in the
midst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself with
impatience.
The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of the
keynote of his life; "I want you to tell me things," she said, but the
father not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to him
to talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering half
serious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker was
happy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before his
daughter went to college had come back to live with him.
After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with her
father almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the din
that filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege.
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