Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; City and town life -- Fiction; Coal mines and mining -- Pennsylvania -- Fiction; Labor leaders -- Fiction
And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new and
commanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the table
and hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. On his
desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. He had
the common experience of being told by the photograph what he had been
trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two women in the
house with him.
Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure.
Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her soft brown
eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challenge caught
and held the attention of men. There was in the girl something of her
father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desires of her
mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrival she
announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. “I am
going to know things I can not get from books,” she said. “I am going to
touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in my mouth. You
thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn't be cooped
up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choir or to an
empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see. I am going
to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live.”
In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothing
were needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American way
she tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confused
and shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set and
made the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work and who
talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token free men and
artists.
Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made an
appeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writer
who lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live
and who sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth and
position she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to David
Ormsby. “My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better man
than all of the noisy reformers that ever lived,” she declared. “He
makes ploughs anyway--makes them well--millions of them. He does not
spend his time talking and running his fingers through his hair. He
works and his work has lightened the labours of millions while the
talkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered.”
In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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