The next day was the time for Margaret's visit to Philip. Not once in all these months had she failed him. Not once had the dawn of that day come without bringing first of all to her mind the thought, "To-day I shall see him."
This morning, however, her waking thought was not of her child, but of the cause which she longed so passionately to help. She had made an engagement the night before to meet Mrs. Greuze at her rooms at ten. She would postpone her visit to Elmhurst till afternoon.
"That's the way it goes," remarked Mrs. Pennybacker caustically as Margaret, dressed for the street, announced this plan. "As soon as the poison of public life gets into a woman's veins, it appears first of all in her neglect of her children. At least that's what they say."
"I am not neglecting my child," Margaret declared indignantly. "I am only trying to find out what I can do to help him. I never had Philip's good more at heart than I have this minute."
"Oh, Margaret, you've got it—bad!"
But the girl was too much in earnest to respond to Mrs. Pennybacker's bantering.
"You want to know what was the very beginning of the movement, you say?" said Mrs. Greuze, as she and Margaret sat together in her well-appointed rooms. "Well, if this ever grows to an oak, Mrs. De Jarnette, it will have come from a very small acorn. The people who started it had not the least idea of its ever reaching the proportions of a bill before Congress, I assure you, for I was in at the start. You see, a few of us last year undertook the study of civics as applied to local affairs. We have found many laws inimical to women—laws of whose existence most of those ladies had never dreamed."
"Judge Kirtley used to say to me," said Margaret, the remark coming back to her with new force, "that people seldom know much about the laws under which they live until they are touched by them."
"That's it exactly. We found laws in force here in this District that we were amazed to know were in existence. That is to say, most of the women knew nothing about them. A few whose lives or work had brought them into contact with law knew. To the rest they were a revelation. Well, the need of the revision of these laws was laid before the Federation of Women's Clubs of the District, and they at once took it up. Our plan is this: We want to get a bill through Congress to amend the laws of the District of Columbia as to married women, to make parents (the mother equally with the father), the natural guardians of their children, and for other purposes of like character. We hope to have the bill introduced early in the session. And then every woman in the City of Washington who is interested in its success must go to work."
"How?" cried Margaret. "Tell me how. I am ready and anxious to work if I only knew what to do."