Margaret smiled with but languid interest. It might be that a man could by law claim his wife's wages and get them; that a woman was not entitled legally even to the clothes she wore;--that was all very hard, but the world was full of hard things, and why should she burden herself with other people's sorrows and wrongs when she was powerless to remedy them? She had enough of her own.... What if women had not the right to sue or be sued? This might be important in the abstract--to the people who theorized--but it all seemed far away and irrelevant. These things must touch very few people. She looked at her watch, thinking that Philip had been in bed two hours now perhaps. She would charge Mammy Cely to be very regular about his hours, and not let him-- "And if it is true that a woman has an inherent right to the money she has earned, to the property she has inherited, to the home she has labored with heart and hand to make, what shall we say of her right to the child she has borne?" Margaret sat up straight, with nerves and muscles tense. As a button pressed a thousand miles away starts all the ponderous machinery, so had this sentence been the electric spark to put her in instant touch with the speaker and her subject. Heart, soul, and mind were alert now. "And yet--there are laws in this District which impliedly deny that a mother has an equal right with the father to those children. More than this, there are laws which give that father a right to will away from her her child. Nay, more even than that,--there are laws which give him the power to will away her _unborn_ child! Do you say that our statutes need no revision when this is where they place women in the closing years of our vaunted nineteenth-century civilization?... You do not believe that this is true? Study the laws. Find out for yourselves. Do not take my word for it. But let me tell you in verification of my statement that there is pending even now in the Courts of this District just such a case. A father willed away his child from its mother, and one court has sustained the will.... You have not known of this?... My friend, that is because it has not touched you." Margaret was staring at her with fascinated eyes. How had this woman known? Was it her cause they were espousing? Was this the touch of nature that made the whole world kin? She heard as in a dream Mrs. Greuze's closing words.