He cut her pensive conjunctive short. "I can guess what you are going to say. Excuse me; go on."
"I cannot give my children everything. But everything, then, would not be everything now."
"I divined your thought." The sympathy radiating from his sturdy tone brought a pleasant light to her eyes.
"Yet you are you," she reasserted.
He laughed. "Logician and flatterer! But you are right. My mother would have had a far harder struggle had she begun to-day. She might not have been able to give me everything, for everything then was not everything now, as you have said."
"Yet you have everything," she persisted, doughtily.
"Even if that were true, it would not signify. You are facing a condition, not a theory. Flour and sugar and standard oil may be cheaper to-day, but the demands of civilization on the individual are so much greater—of civilization everywhere, but especially in this country, where the growth of prosperity has been so prodigious and the stress of competition has become so fierce."
"Oh, yes; oh, yes. You understand," she said, eagerly. "There are so many things which I should like to give my children which I cannot—which I know are beyond my reach, but which would be of infinite service to them in the struggle to make the most of life. You spoke to me once of the limitation of my social lot. That is nothing. What is hard for a mother to bear is the consciousness that her children will fall short of what she would wish them to become because she has not the power to secure for them the best. Yet it must be borne, and borne bravely."
"Yes, it is lamentably hard. The chief blot on the triumph of individualism—on the American principle of the development of self—is that the choicest privileges of civilization should hang beyond the reach of those who are handicapped merely because they are handicapped. The destruction of the poor is their poverty, as my old school-master used to state, though I didn't know then what he meant. And it must be borne, as you say. Even here, where everything is possible to the individual, renunciation still stares the majority in the face as the inexorable virtue."
"Surely," she answered, with simple pathos. "Thank you for understanding me. I knew you would. If I struggle, it is because I am so ambitious for my children to rise. I would not have them remain mere hewers of wood and drawers of water—one of the majority you speak of—as I have been."