The Making of Mary | Page 6

living.' 'Mrs. Constable,' said I, 'if your grandchild were left alone in the world, what would you think of the charity of any body of women who allowed her to go from under their protection to make her living in this way?' 'I don't see the connection,' said she; 'Mary Mason's been fighting the world since she was seven years old, and just because she happens to have a pretty face, you seem to think she should be put in a glass case and never do anything for herself.'"
"She had you there, Belle," said I, pulling her down to the arm of my big easy-chair. "Let the girl alone; she'll come out all right. She's too good-looking for a nurse or a housemaid, and she doesn't know enough arithmetic to be a shop girl. I don't see what else she can do."
"That's just what the ladies calmly decided," said my wife, walking the floor again. "They seemed to think that a little business training would just be the making of Mary. Oh, these Christians!"
"You see, my dear," said I, "committees are not supposed to have any conscience. They have the income of the Refuge in trust for the contributors, and they have no right to keep on supporting a girl who is willing to work for herself. How she proposes to do it is none of their business."
"That's just what it is--their business; their business to see that she doesn't meet the very fate we've saved her from once already. Oh! there's no getting these narrow-minded, orthodox, bigoted people to see more than one side of a question."
"Take care you don't become dogmatic on your own side," said I, rising to knock the ashes out of my pipe. "If it's the law of Karma that's responsible for her having been left to shift for herself at so early an age, it's the same law that's after her now, and I wouldn't interfere with its operations, if I were you."
"You don't in the least understand what you are talking about," and Belle sailed from the room to settle a noisy dispute in the nursery.
CHAPTER II.
THROUGH that winter I caught occasionally a glimpse of Mary Mason on the street, but as I had not the pleasure of her acquaintance, I did not stop to ask her how she was getting on. My wife told me, however, that she lived in a room over a store down town, and took her meals out, and that she was succeeding very well with her subscription list.
"The girl is all right, if only the gossips would let her alone. Some of them assert that she had a child in the Refuge, and though the ladies on our committee indignantly deny that, they shake their heads, and say of course they don't know anything about her now."
"It's the only excitement a lot of these women have," said I. "They wouldn't read a French novel for the world, and some of them wouldn't be seen in a theater, so they have to satisfy their morbid craving for sensationalism by hearing and repeating all sorts of unsavory tales--and they do it in the name of charity! They're very sorry that there is so much wickedness in the world, but since it is there, they enjoy the investigation of details, and it doesn't matter very much whether they're doing any good or not."
"There aren't any details to investigate, so far as Mary Mason is concerned. I took pains to make sure of that, when I heard that a big hulk of a machinist, who rooms on the same flat, was telling lies about her, just because she refused to have anything to say to him."
When I was leaving the Echo office at noon one day I saw Henderson's handsome black span, with the wreck of a sleigh behind them, come down the street at a full gallop, and I was just debating with myself whether my duty as a citizen, which called me to attempt to stop the brutes, was stronger than my duty to my wife and family, which bade me stay where I was, when a young lady jumped the snow ridge at the edge of the sidewalk and flung herself at the bit of the nearest horse. The powerful animal swung her right off her feet, but he was checked for an instant, and in that instant a young man seized the mate on the other side; the team was stopped and surrounded by a crowd directly. Then I saw it was Mary Mason who was the heroine of the drama. She withdrew from the throng, straightened her flat hat above her rosy face, and walked off with her habitual indifferent air.
"She's got good grit, that girl," said I to myself, but I thought no more about