Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.Sanger, Margaret
History
Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control -- United States -- Biography; Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966
At seven-thirty the next morning when I went out for my usual
“constitutional,” Bill Sanger was on the doorstep. He had that type of
romantic nature which appealed to me, and had been waiting there all
night. We took our walk together that day and regularly for many days
thereafter, learning about each other, exploring each other’s minds, and
discovering a community of ideas and ideals. His fineness fitted in with
my whole destiny, if I can call it such, just as definitely as my
hospital training.
I found Bill’s mother a lovely person—artistic, musical, and highly
cultured. His father had been a wealthy sheep rancher in Australia. When
you travel anywhere from there, you practically have to go round the
world, and on his way to San Francisco he had passed through Central
Europe. In a German town he had fallen in love with the Mayor’s youngest
daughter, then only fourteen. When she was of marriageable age he had
returned for her, and it was from this talented mother that Bill had
derived his fondness for music and desire to paint.
Bill was an architect only by profession; he was pure artist by
temperament. Although his heart was not in mechanical drawing, he did it
well. Stanford White once told me he was one of the six best draftsmen
in New York. He confided to me his dream of eventually being able to
leave architecture behind and devote himself to painting, particularly
murals. I had had instilled in me a feeling for the natural relationship
between color and symmetry of line, and sympathized not merely with his
aspirations but was intensely proud of his work. Some day we were going
to be married, and as soon as we had saved enough we would go to Paris,
whither the inspiration of the great French painters was summoning
artists from all over the world.
These plans were nebulous and had nothing to do with my abrupt departure
from New York. One afternoon, about four o’clock, I was standing under a
skylight putting drops in the eyes of a convalescent patient.
Unexpectedly, inexplicably, the glass began to fall apart. Almost by
instinct I pulled my patient under the lintel of the door. A great blast
followed and pandemonium was let loose; the ruined skylight went
crashing down the stairs, plaster and radiators tumbled from the walls,
doors fell out, windows cracked.
I rushed to the bed of the man who needed my first attention. He had
been operated on for a cataract only a few hours previously and my
orders had been not to let him move too soon lest the fluid in his eye
run out and damage his sight permanently. But he with the other
terrified patients was already on his feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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