“She never married again. How could she when you were alive, and in the house.”
“I forgot.”
“She hoped to the last you would be completely restored. All the greatest doctors in the world were called in, and they assured her it was only a question of time. Wonderful discoveries had been made in the Great War as to wounds in the head. But they only gradually learnt to apply them. And the years passed and passed.”
“It would have been kinder to let me die.”
“Did doctors let people die when you were young?”
John shook his head.
“They are the same now,” she said.
“And I suppose Catherine spent her life here, caring for her child, and me, and the poor. She loved the poor.”
“She cared for you and Michael, and she worked ceaselessly for the cause of the oppressed. She battled for it. She went into Parliament as it was called in those days, as soon as the age for women members was lowered from thirty to twenty-one. She strove for the restriction of the White Slave Traffic, and for safeguarding children from the great disease. Some terrible evils were abated by her determined advocacy. But she always said she did not meet the same opposition the first women doctors did a hundred years ago, or as Florence Nightingale had to conquer when she set out to improve the condition of the soldier in hospital and in barracks, and to reduce the barbarities of the workhouses.”