"I don't like to write letters to you. I like to talk to you. I like still better to be silent with you!"
When she thought me in need of it she could be very self-forgetful:
"But I want to see the future big with Romance for you and I would rather feel you came home from voyages two weeks or two months long, with a trunkful of manuscripts; and that, three years from today, you had secured us special rates on a tramp steamer to Plymouth, than that you were going to dodge into subways the rest of your life."
"I would infinitely rather you shipped before the mast—to Bermuda, Borneo, or Buenos Aires. Don't think from this I don't want your face across the table from mine every night the rest of my life!"
Reading to the children, she would retail to me such incidents as:
"Then I read them the Gospel stories, … and they were too funny—R— trying to show me how Herod looked, and J— suggesting charitably that perhaps his wife was good. 'No,' said R—,'the whole family was bad!'"
"In the spring I am going to take an old farmhouse, give the children one brown garment apiece, and plan a scheme of living that will leave something over for other children."
And this appealed to her:
"Well, if it is not in the Fall of 1918, it will be in 'one of those houses Our Lord is building' as J— remarks casually. Did I tell you of the little village in the North Carolina hills where H— and S. L— spent the summer, where the women raised enough sheep to cut the wool, card, and spin and weave the clothes the family wore?"
In the winter of 1914 she first visited Augusta, Georgia, where my father was stationed, and there the campaign against Child Labor, in which she was always vitally interested, became doubly real in necessity to her as she went through the cotton mills and saw conditions at close range. She always gave what sums she could to this cause. In 1915, perhaps the most famous year of the woman suffrage battle, she was campaigning, speaking, watching all day at the polls in her village of Port Washington, Long Island. I remember her speaking from the stage of the Republican Club against a clever anti- suffragist from New York. Her voice reached out for something in the hearts of her audience hid deeper than the appeal of a mere legislative reform. She knew her intellectual ground, but it was something deeper than intellectuality that went home.