Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eating
place renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing and
talking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each other
they playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turn
treating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly.
Secretly neither believed as he talked.
In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floating
in and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of her
father at his desk directing the making of ploughs. "It is clean and
important work," she thought. "He is a big and effective man."
At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his
daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. "She
is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness," he thought "Her
whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she
once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life."
On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as
usual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the long
carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood at
Ormsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hung
over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished
so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality.
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