“I know, it seems strange to you, of course” rejoined the girl, hastily; “but you will see—you will understand when I explain. I have thought of it in all its bearings, and it is the only way. I could not go with you and sing and laugh and dance, and all the while remember that my people back here were suffering.”
“Your people! Dear child, they are not your people nor my people; they are their own people. They come and go as they like. If not in my mills, they work in some other man’s mills. You are not responsible for their welfare. Besides, you have already done more for their comfort and happiness than any human being could expect of you!”
“I know, but you do not understand. It is in a peculiar way that they are my people—not because they are here, but because they are poor and unhappy.” Margaret hesitated, and then went on, her eyes turned away from her guardian’s face. “I don’t know as I can make you understand—as I do. There are people, lots of them, who are generous and kind to the poor. But they are on one side of the line, and the poor are on the other. They merely pass things over the line—they never go themselves. And that is all right. They could not cross the line if they wanted to, perhaps. They would not know how. All their lives they have been surrounded with tender care and luxury; they do not know what it means to be hungry and cold and homeless. They do not know what it means to fight the world alone with only empty hands.”
Margaret paused, her eyes still averted; then suddenly she turned and faced the man sitting in silent dismay at the desk.
“Don’t you see?” she cried. “I have crossed the line. I crossed it long ago when I was a little girl. I do know what it means to be hungry and cold and homeless. I do know what it means to fight the world with only two small empty hands. In doing for these people I am doing for my own. They are my people.”
For a moment there was silence in the little room. To the man at the desk the bottom seemed suddenly to have dropped out of his world. For some time it had been growing on him—the knowledge of how much the presence of this fair-haired, winsome girl meant to him. It came to him now with the staggering force of a blow in the face—and she was going away. To Frank Spencer the days suddenly stretched ahead in empty uselessness—there seemed to be nothing left worth while.
“But, my dear Margaret,” he said at last, unsteadily, “we tried—we all tried to make you forget those terrible days. You were so keenly sensitive—they weighed too heavily on your heart. You—you were morbid, my dear.”
“I know,” she said. “I understand better now. Every one tried to interest me, to amuse me, to make me forget. I was kept from everything unpleasant, and from everybody that suffered. It comes to me very vividly now, how careful every one was that I should know of only happiness.”
“We wanted you to forget.”
“But I never did forget—quite. Even when years and years had passed, and I could go everywhere and see all the beautiful things and places I had read about, and when I was with my friends, there was always something, somewhere, behind things. Those four years in New York were vague and elusive, as time passed. They seemed like a dream, or like a life that some one else had lived. But I know now; they were not a dream, and they were not a life that some one else lived. They were my life. I lived them myself. Don’t you see—now?” Margaret’s eyes were luminous with feeling. Her lips trembled; but her face glowed with a strange exaltation of happiness.