"It is quite necessary nowadays, you know, for women to have 'ideas.' I have ideas on social and moral questions, but I do not know just where I belong when it comes to politics."
The judge lifted his hands with a show of expostulation.
"So our Jean would be a politician," he cried. "Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!"
"Not quite so bad as that, father," replied the young woman, smiling but serious; "but I am in downright earnest. The making, the unmaking and the enforcing of law are politics, and every American woman should have an interest in these things. Every thinking woman must have an interest in them. I must know more of politics."
"You are right," said her father, thoughtfully; "you are right. I do not believe a woman should get out of her sphere, but a woman's influence is mighty, and inasmuch as all law and reform come through the ballot box, there can be no harm in her giving an intelligent hearing to politics."
"Then, father, please listen to me for a few minutes; I want to tell you what has set me to thinking along these lines. Two weeks ago you brought Maggie Crowley here. I went to see her in her room the next morning, and she told me her story. Her mother was sick, the children were hungry and cold, so she started out to find the father before he had spent his money for drink.
"When she finally found him, she found him in a saloon in the act of handing over his last dollar to pay for liquor that others had drunk as well as himself. She got the dollar some way and started home, when, as she said, she fell. The dollar rolled into the street and a passerby picked it up and pocketed it, in spite of the fact that she told him that it was hers, and that it was the last.
"I shall never forget the way she looked when she came to this part of her story. Her eyes brimmed with tears and her voice was lost in a great big sob. She begged me, for the love of heaven, to go to her mother, who must be half-crazed with grief because of her disappearance, and to take her something to eat.
"So Mrs. Floyd fixed a basket of lunch and we went. A lump rose in my throat when I went into that place. It was cold, very cold. Maggie's mother was lying on a bed in one corner of the room, with one thin quilt over her, and a tiny moaning baby at her breast. Sitting on a box near the bed were two children, a small boy and a girl. They were huddled under a fragment of blanket. The boy was crying for something to eat and his sister was trying bravely to comfort him.