I said that God had apparently mislaid the mold in which He had cast Norman.
"I wish that Marie could have as good a husband as I did—she's a better girl."
Nina has immense respect for her daughter. And Marie deserves it. A habit of philosophizing forces me to realize that the greatest part of the world has failed to appreciate, has in fact utterly ignored the existence of, this marvelous foster daughter of mine. There are, doubtless, many parents who even if they had had the good fortune to know Marie would stubbornly prefer their own daughters. But if I were twenty years younger, I would certainly enter the race against Billy. She gets her looks from her mother—pure Lombard—but she has inherited Norman's irreverent, incisive vision and his tricks of speech. She decided to follow her father's chief interest and now, at nineteen, is attending a kindergarten normal school.
But the thing, for which I give Marie my highest reverence is her attitude to her mother. She knows the truth. I found that they had talked this over before Norman died. It was his wish that she should not be told by strangers. And so nothing was hidden from her, no questions were evaded and she grew into the knowledge of her mother's story, with as little shock as she learned the multiplication table. It is very sweet to watch them together, this quiet, sad eyed old woman, who can write with difficulty and this superbly modern girl, who has had every advantage of education. Marie has sense enough to know that very, very few people have been blest with finer mothers.
A few nights after this talk with Nina, I found Marie alone in the library reading a red paper covered book by Earl Krautsky—"The Road to Power." Across the corner, in his big, boyish handwriting, was scrawled, "William Barton."
"Marionette," I said, thinking of what her mother had said, "Do you believe in free love?"
"Not for a minute," she snapped, "it's just another of your man tricks to get the better of your superiors."
Marie is a suffragette. But her jibe at me did not satisfy her. The thing was evidently on her mind. She came over and sat on the arm of my chair.
"Don't laugh at me, Daddy. It's so serious. I think it's all wrapped up in the big woman question. How can there be any real freedom except among equals? In the bottom of my heart I think it is a beautiful ideal. If I were in love with a man, I'd just want to be with him. It seems a little degrading to take a justice of the peace into one's confidence in so private a matter. I would feel ashamed to tell a stranger I was going to love my sweetheart. And in a sense I like the idea of freedom. It would be horrible to have my husband kiss me because it was the law; because he'd promised to—if he didn't really want to.
"But that's only a private personal view of it. It doesn't seem to me the important thing, what the politicians call 'the main issue.' This trying to be individually free, this fussing over individual rights, seems sort of early Victorian...."