An American Suffragette | Page 6

movement that was reaching the women of all countries, and had changed from a gospel of tracts to a militant crusade for their share of the duties and responsibilities of life and the power properly to discharge them. Never had he seen so many of the real leaders of New York society engaged in any work, charitable or otherwise, as had taken part in this parade, marching on foot the full two miles, and often side by side with the working-women of the city.
He had once seen a painting of the Maid of Orleans in a foreign gallery that carried so much of spiritual earnestness that he felt that he could appreciate how easy it was for the French army instinctively to follow her lead, and how much easier it was for the poor dupes of ignorance and superstition to believe that this overmastering spiritual nature was the product of witchcraft.
Absorbing though these thoughts were, they did not exclude another train which had to do with the mysterious banner bearer, and as he entered his hotel he clenched his right hand suddenly and muttered to himself, "I must dismiss her from my thoughts."
CHAPTER III
THE MYSTERIOUS YOUNG WOMAN
Dr. Earl took a late dinner at his sister's house, after having spent an hour with his fiancée on the way. There were just the four of them at table, his sister and her husband, his brother and himself.
His sister was the oldest member of his family, which comprised but the three of them, his father and mother having died some years before.
During the college days of both himself and his brother, who was two years his junior, his sister had assumed the r?le of a mother to them, and right devotedly had she filled the part. She had been more of a "pal" to them than anything else, and some years' residence in England during her schooldays had broadened her vision of the true meaning and value of this relation between those of opposite sex and particularly between brother and sister.
She possessed now, as always, the unbounded respect and confidence of these two young men of thoroughly dissimilar character and temperament, and she was the repository of the sacred secrets of each of them, which she was warned she must never betray to the other. And she never did.
Eight years previous to these occurrences, she had married George Ramsey, President of the Gotham Trust Company, which institution had recently absorbed half a dozen weaker concerns doing a similar business, and more recently had taken over from the New York bankers, who were stockholders in the trust company, the handling of most of the public utility securities that were floated in this country. But George Ramsey was not the pretentious pawnbroker in spirit and manner that so often presides over the destinies of American banks, but he was a philosophical financier who understood perfectly the strength and weakness of the system under which he worked, and who, while he wondered at the supine idiocy of the people that would permit of the prevailing Dick Turpin methods of high finance, never took his eye from the horizon of public action, where daily he expected to see "the cloud no bigger than a man's hand" that was to expand into the storm that would engulf these and other long permitted public ills.
Many times recently he had sounded the alarm of the dangers attending recapitalization of properties that already bore a heavy weight of watered securities, but his colleagues had laughed at what they termed his fears, and had attempted to reassure him of their complete possession of the departments of government that controlled such matters. Bred to the banking business, he had no thought of transferring his abilities and energies to the realm of statesmanship, but in the sanctum of his own home he would often pour forth his disgust with, and his fear of, such methods, to the tall, clear-eyed, clear-brained and beautiful woman from whom John and Frank Earl were wont to seek advice in their perplexities. And from her he always received valuable suggestions, a keener insight into the motives of men, a broader, more humane view-point, and withal a firmness to set himself, in part, where the law of the land should have been set wholly, as a barrier against the worst of these public depredations.
Mr. and Mrs. George Ramsey were the same lovers now that they were during their honeymoon. In the crowded ballroom, at the opera, in the automobile after the harassing cares of the day, on land or sea, he was always the admiring and devoted attendant, and gave expression to his feelings in a variety of new and interesting ways. It was evident that they had not run counter to the influence of the stars in waiting for