“Are they so much worse off than most American business men?” queried Rankin. “Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more than the outside of their children; and isn’t seeing them asleep about as—”
Lydia cut him short quickly. “You’re always blaming them for that,” she cried. “You ought to pity them. They can’t help it. It’s better for the children to have bread and butter, isn’t it—”
Rankin shook his head. “I can’t be fooled with that sort of talk—I’ve lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn’t a question of bread and butter. It’s a question of giving the children bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of course, I’m a fanatic on the subject. I’d rather leave off even the butter than the father—let alone the sugar.”
“But here’s this very motorman you know about—what could he do?”
“They’re not forced by the company to work seven days a week—only they’re not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating dress, as good as anybody’s, and a graduating ‘present.’ It seems that’s the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time when she was humiliated by being different from other girls.”
“Well, my goodness! you’re not criticizing them for that, are you? I think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a girl feels.”
Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, “I see what you mean, of course,” she said slowly, “that it would be better for her, perhaps—but if he loves her, her father wants to do things for her.”
Rankin’s roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant startled by it. “I don’t say he can do too much for her,” he cried. “He can’t! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it’s the right thing.”
“And what in the world do you think would be the right thing in this case?” Lydia put the question as a poser.
“Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of her father’s point of view—”