“Bless you!” responded Marion heartily, “I’m strong-minded myself; want to vote and all that. Don’t believe intemperance and lots of other evils will ever be subdued in this country, until women have something to say, and say it through the ballot-box. It is not so very dreadful when you once get on to that platform, is it?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of voting particularly,” Salome hastened to answer. “I don’t really think I want that. But I do want to do something for my people.”
“And you’ll find,” retorted Marion, “before you’ve gone very far, that if you had the power of legislation, you could help them ten times as well.”
“Possibly,” Salome answered, doubtfully. “But, Marion, there are so many things absolutely necessary to be done for the Shawsheen operatives. If you could see them and the homes they live in, the temptations to which they are exposed, the poverty in which they live!”
“And you propose to go to work among them,—to reform them?”
“Yes, God helping me; them and the factory system together. Behold me,” said Salome, rising to her full height, and putting on a mock-tragic air: “Behold and see: Salome Shepard, Reformer. That’s my platform.”
“Salome, dear, what do you mean?” Mrs. Soule had just come in. “Don’t mind her, Marion, she delights in hearing herself talk like a suffrage leader, lately. I don’t approve of it, as she knows; but I can only wait for the mood to pass.”
“Which it never will, aunty dear,” Salome hastened to say. “So long as I live and am in a condition to work for the people who need substantial and material aid, as these people do, my life will be devoted to their service. I cannot go on living the aimless, indifferent life which has been mine ever since I left school. I must have some active interest, or I shall stagnate, or, worse still, settle into a cold, hard, selfish woman of the world. Unfortunately I was born with a heart; unfortunately for your ideal of the proper young lady of the period, I was born with a conscience, and this conscience tells me that my fortune was given me only in trust. It is not mine for selfish enjoyment alone; it is mine to make the world better and happier and purer.”
“And you are going to work among those miserable drunken operatives,” said her aunt coldly, “whose sordid lives, and ungrateful hearts, the whole of them, are not worth the effort of even one month of your life, even if you were at all a capable woman of affairs, a woman of judgment and discretion, a woman of sound business sense,—which you are not.”
“Yes, ‘among the drunken miserable operatives,’” replied Salome, ignoring the latter part of her aunt’s speech. “Among those sordid lives and ungrateful hearts, that were worth the Christ’s dying, and for whom He worked, living.”