XIII
MR. LEIGH.
Now, to recur to the period of my arrival in the West—the day after Miss Leigh's return home her father paid her the unusual honor of leaving his office to take lunch with her.
Her mind was full of the subject of the paper she had read in the press that morning, giving a lurid picture of the inconvenience and distress entailed on the passengers and scoring the management of the company for permitting what was claimed to be "so gross a breach of the rights of the public."
Ordinarily, she would have passed it over with indifference—a shrug of her white shoulders and a stamp of her little foot would have been all the tribute she would have paid to it. But of late she had begun to think.
It had never before been brought so clearly to the notice of the girl how her own pleasures—not the natural but the created pleasures—of which she was quite as fond as other healthy girls of her age and class, were almost exclusively at the expense of the class she had been accustomed to regard with a general sort of vague sympathy as "the Poor."
The attack on her father and herself enraged her; but, as she cooled down, a feeling deeper than mere anger at an injustice took possession of her mind.
To find that she herself had, in a way, been the occasion of the distress to women and children, startled her and left in her mind a feeling of uneasiness to which she had hitherto been a stranger.
"Father," she began, "did you see that dreadful article in the Trumpet this morning?"
Mr. Leigh, without looking up, adopted the natural line of special pleading, although he knew perfectly well instantly the article to which she referred.