had the effect of symbols.  She furnished watchwords for her listeners, and she did it unconsciously.  She would have been indignant if she had been told how large a part her education in Silvertree played in her present aptitude.  She had grown up in a town which feasted on dramatic gossip, and which thrived upon the specific personal episode.  To the vast and terrific city, and to her portion of the huge task of mitigating the woe of its unfit, Kate brought the quality which, undeveloped, would have made of her no more than an entertaining village gossip.

What stories there were to tell!  What stories of bravery in defeat, of faith in the midst of disaster, of family devotion in spite of squalor and subterfuges and all imaginable shiftlessness and shiftiness.

Kate had got hold of the idea of the universality of life—­the universality of joy and pain and hope.  She was finding it easy now to forgive “the little brothers” for all possible perversity, all defects, all ingratitude.  Wayward children they might be,—­children uninstructed in the cult of goodness, happiness, serenity,—­but outside the pale of human consideration they could not be.  The greater their fault the greater their need.  Kate was learning, in spite of her native impatience and impulsiveness, to be very patient.  She was becoming the defender of those who stumbled, the explainer of those who themselves lacked explanations or who were too defiant to give them.

So she was going to Washington.  She was to talk on a proposed school for the instruction of mothers.  She often had heard her father say that a good mother was an exception.  She had not believed him—­had taken it for granted that this idea of his was a part of his habitual pessimism.  But since she had come up to the city and become an officer of the Children’s Protective Association, she had changed her mind, and a number of times she had been on the point of writing to her father to tell him that she was beginning to understand his point of view.

This idea of a school for mothers had been her own, originally, and a development of the little summer home for Polish mothers which she had helped to establish.  She had proposed it, half in earnest, merely, at Hull House on a certain occasion when there were a number of influential persons present.  It had appealed to them, however, as a practical means of remedying certain difficulties daily encountered.

Just how large a part Jane Addams had played in the enlightenment of Kate’s mind and the dissolution of her inherent exclusiveness, Kate could not say.  Sometimes she gave the whole credit to her.  For here was a woman with a genius for inclusiveness.  She was the sister of all men.  If a youth sinned, she asked herself if she could have played any part in the prevention of that sin had she had more awareness, more solicitude.  It was she who had, more than others,—­though there was a great army of men and women of good will to sustain her,—­promulgated