"The fact that such a bill had been passed after much agitation might have its effect upon the decision of the court when your case comes up. I should not say that that would be impossible, nor even improbable. But that is the only way in which it could affect it. A law like that would not be retroactive. It is better for you to know this now, Margaret."
She sat so long without speaking that he began nervously to dread a break-down or an outburst such as she used to give way to. He had no need to fear. The woman before him was not the girl of those tempestuous days. No school develops us so swiftly as sorrow's school. With the little nunnery maid who talked with Guinevere, she had learned
"to cry her cry in silence, and have done."
"But it would help other women, in years to come," she said at last in a voice that thrilled with feeling—"women who cannot fight for themselves—" the woman of the street was before her—"who do not have a friend like you to fight for them?"
"Unquestionably. If that bill becomes a law no other woman in this District will ever stand where you do to-day pleading for her child."
She stood up then with eyes shining and head thrown back.
"Then let me do what I can," she cried. "This is not for one woman but for many."
Oddly enough, as he looked at her, there came into his mind two pictures he had seen on her own walls,—one, the old familiar one of the sitting mother clasping to her heart the Divine Child as if she would keep Him forever within her sheltering arms; the other, with face illumined and a larger vision that took in the whole world's needs, holding the Christ-child up, an offering to humanity.
The woman before him might have been a "chair madonna" yesterday; to-day she was a "Sistine."