this idea of responsibility.  A city, she maintained, was a great home.  She demanded, then, to know if the house was made attractive, instructive, protective.  Was it so conducted that the wayward sons and daughters, as well as the obedient ones, could find safety and happiness within it?  Were the privileges only for the rich, the effective, and the out-reaching?  Or were they for those who lacked the courage to put out their hands for joy and knowledge?  Were they for those who had not yet learned the tongue of the family into which they had newly entered?  Were they for those who fought the rules and shirked the cares and dug for themselves a pit of sorrow?  She believed they were for all.  She could not countenance disinheritance.  Yes, always, in high places and low, among friends and enemies, this sad, kind, patient, quiet woman, Jane Addams, of Hull House, had preached the indissolubility of the civic family.  Kate had listened and learned.  Nay, more, she had added her own interpretations.  She was young, strong, brave, untaught by rebuff, and she had the happy and beautiful insolence of those who have not known defeat.  She said things Jane Addams would have hesitated to say.  She lacked the fine courtesy of the elder woman; but she made, for that very reason, a more dramatic propaganda.

* * * * *

Kate had known what it was to tramp the streets in rain and wind; she had known what it was to face infection and drunken rage; she had looked on sights both piteous and obscene; but she had now begun—­and much, much sooner than was usual with workers in her field—­to reap some of the rewards of toil.

Soon or late things in this life resolve themselves into a question of personality.  History and art, success and splendor, plenitude and power, righteousness and immortal martyrdom, are all, in the last resolve, personality and nothing more.  Kate was having her swift rewards because of that same indescribable, incontestable thing.  The friendship of remarkable women and men—­women, particularly—­was coming to her.  Fine things were being expected of her.  She had a vitality which indicated genius—­that is, if genius is intensity, as some hold.  At any rate, she was vividly alert, naturally eloquent, physically capable of impressing her personality upon others.

She thought little of this, however.  She merely enjoyed the rewards as they came, and she was unfeignedly surprised when, on her way to Washington, whither she traveled with many others, her society was sought by those whom she had long regarded with something akin to awe.  She did not guess how her enthusiasm and fresh originality stimulated persons of lower vitality and more timid imagination.