Miss Hardy, the woman labor inspector for the state, a girl who had
worked in various factories since she was twelve and who had gotten her
education at a night school, where often she fell asleep at her desk, I
find both entertaining and instructing, but Kitty would not care for
her. She wears spectacles, and Kitty has an unyielding antipathy for
women who wear spectacles. Neither would she care for Miss Bayne,
another state employee, a clever, capable woman who is an expert in her
line. It is her business to discover feeble-mindedness, to test school
children, and inmates of institutions to which they have been sent, or
of places to which they have gone because of incapacity or delinquency
or sin of any sort; and nothing I have read in books has been so
revealing concerning conditions that exist as her frank statements
simply told.
In my sitting-room at Scarborough Square she comes in frequently for
tea with me, and meets there Fannie Harris, the teacher of an open-air
school for the tuberculosis children of our neighborhood; and Martha
White, the district nurse for our particular section; meets Miss Hay, a
probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and Loulie Hill, a girl from
the country who had once gone wrong, and who is now trying to keep
straight on five dollars a week made in the sewing-room of one of the
city's hospitals. Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of
epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs.
Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing,
also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been
forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are
of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an
epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a
calling of things by names that are their own.
These and various others who are facing at short range realities of
which I have long been personally ignorant, are taking me into new
worlds, pumping streams of new understandings, new outreaches, into my
brain and heart, and life has become big and many-sided, and a thing
not to be wasted. Myself of the old life I am seeing as I never saw
before, seeing in a perspective that does not fill with pride.
Last night I went to my first dinner-party since Aunt Matilda's death.
In Kitty's car I watched with interest, on the way to her house, the
long stretches of dingy streets, then cleaner ones, with their old and
comfortable houses; the park, with its bare trees and shrubs, and
finally the Avenue, with its smooth paving and pretentious homes, its
hurrying cars of luxurious make, its air of conscious smartness. As
contrast to my present home it interested greatly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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