"Oh, Margaret, you've got it--bad!" But the girl was too much in earnest to respond to Mrs. Pennybacker's bantering. "You want to know what was the very beginning of the movement, you say?" said Mrs. Greuze, as she and Margaret sat together in her well-appointed rooms. "Well, if this ever grows to an oak, Mrs. De Jarnette, it will have come from a very small acorn. The people who started it had not the least idea of its ever reaching the proportions of a bill before Congress, I assure you, for I was in at the start. You see, a few of us last year undertook the study of civics as applied to local affairs. We have found many laws inimical to women--laws of whose existence most of those ladies had never dreamed." "Judge Kirtley used to say to me," said Margaret, the remark coming back to her with new force, "that people seldom know much about the laws under which they live until they are touched by them." "That's it exactly. We found laws in force here in this District that we were amazed to know were in existence. That is to say, most of the women knew nothing about them. A few whose lives or work had brought them into contact with law knew. To the rest they were a revelation. Well, the need of the revision of these laws was laid before the Federation of Women's Clubs of the District, and they at once took it up. Our plan is this: We want to get a bill through Congress to amend the laws of the District of Columbia as to married women, to make parents (the mother equally with the father), the natural guardians of their children, and for other purposes of like character. We hope to have the bill introduced early in the session. And then every woman in the City of Washington who is interested in its success must go to work." "How?" cried Margaret. "Tell me how. I am ready and anxious to work if I only knew what to do." "In the first place we have to make friends for this bill. Any woman who has influence with any member of the Senate must use it now. I say Senate because it is to be introduced there. It will go to the House later. We want if possible to get personal pledges from every Senator that he will vote for this bill when it comes up. Do you know anybody in the Senate? Your case is so directly in point that it ought to make you a powerful advocate." "Yes, I have had a number of acquaintances in the Senate. My father was thrown much with public men and was in the habit of having them frequently at his home." "Then certainly the position in which the present laws have placed his orphaned daughter will appeal to them. Think up every one, my dear, that you could possibly reach. This movement represents five thousand women and to make it a success everybody that can do anything must go to work." "And these women are doing all this in order to secure a mother's right to her child!" ejaculated Margaret, with a growing sense of her own narrowness of vision.