A Daughter of the Morning

by Zona Gale

I remember how I ended. I heard myself saying it as if it were some one else speaking:

"I'm with you. You must let me plan with you. But I can't plan with a few of you, when the rest don't care. I want you all."

When the evening was over, and I had found those I knew and met those whom I didn't know, and had set down my name with the list that grew before the door, made up of those who were willing "not to fight, but to help," I stood for a minute in the lower hallway with Rose.

"Oh, Cosma," she said, "I've got to tell you something. I done you dead wrong. I thought last night that you'd gone over—that you didn't care any more."

"I didn't," I said. "It had got me—the thing that gets folks."

Next day I rehearsed my oration for the Savage Prize contest. When I'd finished, Miss Spot told me that I needn't practise it any more before her—just to say it over in my room through the three days until the contest was to take place.

"You deliver it as well as I could myself, Cosma," she said.

So I walked back to my room, tore up my oration, and set to work to write another. My head and my heart were full of what that other was to be. I had been beating and pricking with it all night long after the meeting.

Savage Prize Day was a great day at the school. We were given engraved invitations to send out. I sent mine to Mrs. Bingy and Rose and the girls in the factory. I knew they couldn't come; but I knew, too, they'd like getting something engraved. Only it happened that not only Mrs. Bingy came—Rose and the girls came, too. Handed to them with their pay envelope had been the notice to quit. Somebody had told the superintendent about that meeting. Six of the leaders were let out. I saw them all sitting there when I got up on the platform. And they gave me strength, there in all that lot of well-dressed, soft-voiced folks. They were dear people, too. Only they were dear, different. And they didn't understand anything whatever about life, the way Mrs. Bingy and Rose and I did. And that wasn't those folks' fault either. But they seemed to take credit for it.