"I've seen her a good deal while I've been watching the Senate," he said. "I'd been out there for several sessions of the General Assembly before I located there. She came in one day with a letter from some national woman's organization—wanted the Beveridge Child Labor Law endorsed, I think. Anyhow, time was of the essence of the contract, so we drew up a concurrent resolution, and she got a Republican and a Democrat to introduce it together, and it slid along on its way to Washington within forty-eight hours; she and a Mrs. Platt worked it together. All they said was that the women wanted it."
Miss Holland gasped. "Go on," she said.
He lowered his voice, for the president was introducing a handsome girl who was to give a reading.
"Another time there was a bill—I don't recollect it, but something about committing girl prisoners, or something of the sort; I saw her get pretty white, and shut her lips hard, and then she got up and started to walk out, and one of the Senators saw her, too. 'Say, you don't like that bill?' he said, and she answered, as if she could hardly control her anger, 'It's infamous!' 'Oh, it is, is it?' he said. 'Well, then, we'll make them adjourn over until we can get a conference and amend the thing.' No fuss, no talk; just straight goods. That's Carroll Renner."
"And that's what it means to be an enfranchised woman!" said Miss Holland, with a long breath. "None of us could do that here!"
"Well, that's part of it," acquiesced Frank, and then they listened silently. The girl who was reading was not particularly well-trained, but there were passion and pathos in her voice as she told the story of the eaglet, chained to a log for fear it might fall if permitted to attempt to fly.
"We also have our dream of a Garden," the strong young voice went on. "But it lies in a distant future. We dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man, and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil and labor, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than any the Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labor and made beautiful by their own fellowship.
"In his Apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth; we see a new earth; but therein dwells love—the love of comrades and co-workers.
"It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the future, so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive acquiescence in the present, that to-day we are found everywhere raising our strange new cry, 'Labor, and the training that fits us for labor!'"
"You recognize it, of course?" Silvia said to Dr. Earl, but he shook his head, and Frank answered, "It's Olive Schreiner, isn't it? She does good work, but I've never read anything that compared with that book on 'Woman and Economics,' and when an American writer has the whole world sitting up and taking notice, I don't see why we don't boost her game."