... At this time it seems well for me to send you money. Hard as it has been for me to refrain, I felt before this that it was best for you to face New York alone, unaided. As there is a New Generation, my child, there is a New Fatherhood which dares--dares even to allow the heart’s darling to struggle alone; dares to say “hands off” to all the untransmuted emotions which rush forth to shield the fledgling from the world---- Fifty dollars. Pidge sank back and softly batted her pillow with one loose arm. She laughed in a smothery uncertain way that was not of joy.... It was as if she heard his voice in the room--the new parenthood, the new generation, the adjustment of motive to moment! The sort of thing in this letter always shook and tortured Pidge. It was a part of her. She was bred of it. She had been half as old as now when she first realized it. Then in every thought and act, she had rushed to the other extreme. It was true that her father had taught her the deepest things in books. In his study, she had caught hints of the inner meanings of inaccessible literatures, before she had learned to spell simple words of English. Because his eyes hurt, she had read aloud for hours, day after day, tomes out of Asia which she had no care nor thought to understand, but from which, volatile fairylike impressions came to rest in the depths of her heart. She had loved the few central springs of books in a house of books, until she realized that her father read, but lived them not; that he expounded, exhorted upon the doctrines--but his life was his own twisted rag. That was when Pidge’s heavens cracked--and she had set out to be honest and erect, if only as tall as a gnome. The thought that came at this moment had come before. It was the passion to be what her father was not that had made her rush forth to be straight in her own head--to refuse to lie to herself--to go to the other extreme of fierceness and bleakness and ill-temper, rather than lie to herself--to be plain and true, if she had to be a man-hater and poison face. Yet Pidge sat up straight with a bitter thought. Like it or not, she saw right now that it was her father who had prepared her to accept and make good, possibly, in this position with _The Public Square_.... “But where did he get the money?” she muttered at last. She crossed to the open window. April breathed up to her from the stone floor of the area to-night; magic April, breathing up through the trampled earth and the degraded pavements. Suddenly a soft love stole over her. It was love of the April dark.