Earlier in life she had quaffed and enjoyed the wine of applause.  I recollect vividly her telling me of the lure her beauty had been to her—­the most terrible temptation that could come to a woman.  “I walk into a brilliant room, and I feel the thrill of admiration that goes through the crowd.  I have a sudden sense of my own physical perfection—­a glow all over me!  I draw a deep breath—­I feel a surge of exaltation.  I say, ’I am victorious—­I can command!  I have this supreme crown of womanly grace—­I am all-powerful with it—­the world is mine!’”

As she spoke the rapture was in her voice, and I looked at her—­and yes, she was beautiful!  The supreme crown was hers!

“I see other beautiful women,” she went on—­and swift anger came into her voice.  “I see what they are doing with this power!  Gratifying their vanity—­turning men into slaves of their whim!  Squandering money upon empty pleasures—­and with the dreadful plague of poverty spreading in the world!  I used to go to my father, ’Oh, papa, why must there be so many poor people?  Why should we have servants—­why should they have to wait on me, and I do nothing for them?’ He would try to explain to me that it was the way of Nature.  Mamma would tell me it was the will of the Lord—­’The poor ye have always with you’—­’Servants, obey your masters’—­and so on.  But in spite of the Bible texts, I felt guilty.  And now I come to Douglas with the same plea—­and it only makes him angry!  He has been to college and has a lot of scientific phrases—­he tells me it’s ’the struggle for existence,’ ’the elimination of the unfit’—­and so on.  I say to him, ’First we make people unfit, and then we have to eliminate them.’  He cannot see why I do not accept what learned people tell me—­why I persist in questioning and suffering.”

She paused, and then added, “It’s as if he were afraid I might find out something he doesn’t want me to!  He’s made me give him a promise that I won’t see Mrs. Frothingham again!” And she laughed.  “I haven’t told him about you!”

I answered, needless to say, that I hoped she would keep the secret!

24.  All this time I was busy with my child-labour work.  We had an important bill before the legislature that session, and I was doing what I could to work up sentiment for it.  I talked at every gathering where I could get a hearing; I wrote letters to newspapers; I sent literature to lists of names.  I racked my mind for new schemes, and naturally, at such times, I could not help thinking of Sylvia.  How much she could do, if only she would!

I spared no one, least of all myself, and so it was not easy to spare her.  The fact that I had met her was the gossip of the office, and everybody was waiting for something to happen.  “How about Mrs. van Tuiver?” my “chief” would ask, at intervals.  “If she would only go on our press committee” my stenographer would sigh.

The time came when our bill was in committee, a place of peril for bills.  I went to Albany to see what could be done.  I met half a hundred legislators, of whom perhaps half-a-dozen had some human interest in my subject; the rest, well, it was discouraging.  Where was the force that would stir them, make them forget their own particular little grafts, and serve the public welfare in defiance to hostile interests?