“Spartan!” she exclaimed. “All Spartans! And I had so much! They tell me my husband’s estate will be about two million dollars.”
David Joslin smiled. “It must be fine,” said he, “to know where your next meal’s going to come from. I’ve hardly ever known that.”
“Granny Williams said—— You see, I have no children of my own. And here—why, here are hundreds waiting.”
He was looking far over the hills.
“Do you suppose,” she went on after a time; as he remained silent, “do you suppose if I built another building up on the hill, with a part of this money he made out of this very country—if I built one building for girls, dormitories, you know, or class rooms—big enough for two or three hundred children—would there be that many?”
He smiled. “Many thousands,” he replied. “They’d come from fifty miles around, a hundred miles—everyone begging, like these old people in my night classes, to learn how to read and write. They want knowledge, Ma’am! They want up—they want out! If you could help in that—I don’t think you’d feel ‘worthless,’ ever again! Whether you ever did that or not, you mustn’t ever say that word again. At least, you’ve given one man, once hopeless, his hope and his chance—and his dreams, we’ll say. I’ve had quite some dreams, you see.”
“Fifteen or twenty thousand dollars would go quite a way toward making a building of that sort?”
He smiled.
“There’s not been fifty dollars put into our building, I suppose, Ma’am,” said he. “Twenty thousand dollars—that’s more money than there is in all this county. But there’s twenty thousand millions in sight of where we sit.”
She turned to him contritely—“It’s plain enough what my husband and his Company wanted to do with these people—they wanted to steal away their very birthright, before they were wise enough to know its value. It wouldn’t be charity for me—it wouldn’t be even a gift. It wouldn’t be a fraction of what you have owing to you from me and mine.