The Making of Mary | Page 6

daughters of
their own growing up at home, voted to let that girl go round this town
selling a book."
"Was that what she wanted to do herself?"
"Yes; but think of them letting her do it! You know as well as I do what
sort of a city this is, and whether it's safe for a lovely girl like that to go
to men's offices, trying with her pretty looks and ways to wheedle them
into subscribing for Stanley's 'Darkest Africa.' Oh, I was wild! I said to
Mrs. Robinson: 'How would you like your Lulu to do it?' 'The cases are
very different,' said she; 'my daughter has no need to earn her 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