“I can’t help looking forward, Kate, to the time when you’ll be in your own home.  You think you’re all bound up in this public work, but I can tell by the looks of you that you’re just the one to make a good wife for some fine man.  I hope you don’t think it impertinent of me, but I can’t make out why you haven’t taken one or the other of the men who want you.”

“You think some one wants me?” asked Kate provokingly.

“Oh, we all know that Dr. von Shierbrand would rather be taking you home to see his old German mother than to be made President of the University of Chicago; and that nice Mr. McCrea is nearly crazy over the way you treat him.”

“But it would seem so stale—­life in a home with either of them!  Should I just have to sit at the window and watch for them to come home?”

“You know you wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Dennison, almost crossly.  “Why do you tease me?  What’s good enough for other women ought to be good enough for you.”

“Oh, what a bad one I am!” cried Kate.  “Of course what is good enough for better women than I ought to be good enough for me.  But yet—­shall I tell the truth about myself?”

“Do,” said Mrs. Dennison, placated.  “I want you to confide in me, Kate.”

“Well, you see, dear lady, suppose that I marry one of the gentlemen of whom you have spoken.  Suppose I make a pleasant home for my husband, have two or three nice children, and live a happy and—­well, a good life.  Then I die and there’s the end.”

“Well, of course I don’t think that’s the end,” broke in Mrs. Dennison.

Kate evaded the point.

“I mean, there’s an end of my earthly existence.  Now, on the other hand, suppose I get this Bureau for Children through.  Suppose it becomes a fact.  Let us play that I am asked to become the head of it, or, if not that, at least to assist in carrying on its work.  Then, suppose that, as a result of my work, the unprotected children have protection; the education of all the children in the country is assured—­even of the half-witted, and the blind and the deaf and the vicious.  Suppose that the care and development of children becomes a great and generally comprehended science, like sanitation, so that the men and women of future generations are more fitted to live than those we now see about us.  Don’t you think that will be better worth while than my individual happiness?  They think a woman heroic when she sacrifices herself for her children, but shouldn’t I be much more heroic if I worked all my life for other people’s children?  For children yet to be born?  I ask you that calmly.  I don’t wish you to answer me to-day.  I’m in earnest now, dear Mrs. Dennison, and I’d like you to give me a true answer.”

There was a little pause.  Mrs. Dennison was trifling nervously with the frogs on her black silk jacket.  When she spoke, it was rather diffidently.

“I could answer you so much better, my dear Kate,” she said at length, “if I only knew how much or how little vanity you have.”