Her heart swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,--to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning unless there was some one to say to her--to her and to none other: "I understand."
Mrs. Barsaloux did not come to America at Christmas time. Karl Wander did not--as he had thought he might--visit Chicago. The holiday season seemed to bring little to Kate except a press of duties. She aspired to go to bed Christmas night with the conviction that not a child in her large territory had spent a neglected Christmas. This meant a skilled coöperation with other societies, with the benevolently inclined newspapers, and with generous patrons. The correspondence involved was necessarily large, and the amount of detail to be attended to more than she should have undertaken, unaided, but she was spurred on by an almost consuming passion of pity and sisterliness. That sensible detachment which had marked her work at the outset had gradually and perhaps regrettably disappeared. So far from having outgrown emotional struggle, she seemed now, because of something that was taking place in her inner life, to be increasingly susceptible to it.
Her father's death had taken from her the last vestige of a home. She had now no place which she could call her own, or to which she would instinctively turn at Christmas time. To be sure, there were many who bade her to their firesides, and some of these invitations she accepted with gratitude and joy. But she could, of course, only pause at the hearthstones of others. Her thoughts winged on to other things--to the little poor homes where her wistful children dwelt, to the great scheme for their care and oversight which daily came nearer to realization.
A number of benevolent women--rich in purse and in a passion for public service--desired her to lecture. She was to explain the meaning of the Bureau of Children at the state federations of women's clubs, in lyceum courses, and wherever receptive audiences could be found. They advised, among other things, her attendance at the biennial meeting of the General Federation of Women's Clubs which was meeting that coming spring in Southern California.
The time had been not so far distant when she would have had difficulty in seeing herself in the rôle of a public lecturer, but now that she had something imperative to say, she did not see herself in any "rôle" at all. She ceased to think about herself save as the carrier of a message.
Her Christmas letter from Wander was at once a disappointment and a shock.
"I've made a mess of things," he wrote, "and do not intend to intrude on you until I have shown myself more worthy of consideration. I try to tell myself that my present fiasco is not my fault, but I've more than a suspicion that I'm playing the coward's part when I think that. You can be disappointed in me if you like. I'm outrageously disappointed. I thought I was made of better stuff.
"I don't know when I'll have time for writing again, for I shall be very busy. I suppose I'll think about you more than is good for me. But maybe not. Maybe the thoughts of you will be crowded out. I'm rather curious to see. It would be better for me if they would, for I've come to a bad turn in the road, and when I get around it, maybe all of the old familiar scenes--the window out of which your face looked, for example--will be lost to me. I send my good wishes to you all the same. I shall do that as long as I have a brain and a heart.
"Faithfully,
"WANDER."
"That means trouble," reflected Kate, and had a wild desire to rush to his aid.