The winter of 1917–18 was particularly hard; the snow drifted high and lasted long, and it took forced cheer to keep your spirits up. Dr. Mary Halton assured me that with ceaseless financial worry, inadequate rest, incessant traveling, improper nourishment, I could not survive long. When, therefore, a publisher asked me for a book on labor problems, I snatched ten-year-old Grant out of school and set off for California, taking a small place at Coronado where I sat myself down for three months to write and to get acquainted with my son. I loved the sunshine. It was a pleasure to be out-of-doors, to have peace and quiet and the leisure to arrange my thoughts and put them on paper. I had no inclination towards a labor book, but thoroughly enjoyed letting loose my pent-up feelings on _Woman and the New Race_. It was good to classify reasons and set them in order. My opinions did emerge, and it was a great release. I was vividly reminded of prison one day when Grant came home from the school he was attending, both his eyes pretty dirty-looking. I asked him why he had been fighting. “I don’t want to tell you.” “I’d like to know.” “Well, this boy told all the fellows my mother’d been in jail.” “What did you do?” “I hit him, and he hit me back. He said, ‘Your mother’s a jailbird,’ and I said, ‘She’s not.’ Then another fellow said, ‘My mother says your mother went to jail too.’” Grant had replied, “That wasn’t my mother, that was another Margaret Sanger.” “How could you say that, Grant? You know it wasn’t true.” “Mother,” he replied profoundly, “you could never make those fellows understand.” _Chapter Twenty-one_ THUS TO REVISIT The event of my visit to London in 1920 was the beginning of my friendship with H. G. Wells. There was no aloofness or coldness in approaching him, no barriers to break down as with most Englishmen; his twinkling eyes were like those of a mischievous boy. I was pleased to find he had no beard and no white hair, because it seemed to me I had heard of him since I had begun to think at all. Wells had ranged every field of knowledge, had dared to invade the sacrosanct precincts of the historian, the economist, and the scientist and, though a layman in these fields, had used his extraordinary gifts to interpret the past and present and even prophesy the future; in novel after novel he had shocked England by championing women’s right to a freer life.