The fact that people of all sorts and conditions were taking an interest in the gathering of the evening aroused Margaret's curiosity in regard to it, and it cannot be denied that it inclined her to look upon a woman's meeting with more toleration than she had ever supposed she could feel. As Mrs. Pennybacker had said, they certainly must be in earnest, and earnestness always commands respect even if the zeal it induces is ill-judged. She would try to go with an unbiased mind.
But when they entered the hall and she saw a woman speaker on the platform, her inherited conservatism asserted itself. It seemed a bold thing for a woman to do. She felt that she was doing almost a disreputable thing to come here. Her father would not have approved of it, she was sure. He had always felt that home was the woman's kingdom. She could almost hear him now saying:
"Queens you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter, of womanhood."
Even though the speaker was clothed in soft raiment and did not seem at all masculine, she could not rid herself of the feeling that it was not a womanly thing for her to be here on this platform. Ruskin was right when he said:
"But alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest."
When Mrs. Greuze began to speak it was in no receptive mood that Margaret listened, but rather in a spirit of impatient criticism. The thing seemed so far apart from life.
After a while she found herself wondering with rather a curious interest what the speaker would say next, but with no spark struck between them. Mrs. Greuze was telling of the laws of the District in regard to married women and their property rights, their inability to buy, to sell, and to hold in their own right. Mrs. Pennybacker was listening intently.
"That is as true as Gospel!" she whispered in assent to some assertion that struck her as specially forcible. "I've known a hundred cases in Missouri where a woman's property was simply absorbed by her husband when she was married and if she wanted five dollars to give to the missionary cause in after years she had to go to him for it, and he always thought he was making her a present of it!"
Margaret smiled with but languid interest. It might be that a man could by law claim his wife's wages and get them; that a woman was not entitled legally even to the clothes she wore;—that was all very hard, but the world was full of hard things, and why should she burden herself with other people's sorrows and wrongs when she was powerless to remedy them? She had enough of her own.... What if women had not the right to sue or be sued? This might be important in the abstract—to the people who theorized—but it all seemed far away and irrelevant. These things must touch very few people. She looked at her watch, thinking that Philip had been in bed two hours now perhaps. She would charge Mammy Cely to be very regular about his hours, and not let him—
"And if it is true that a woman has an inherent right to the money she has earned, to the property she has inherited, to the home she has labored with heart and hand to make, what shall we say of her right to the child she has borne?"