Probably the child didn't realize, herself. Well,
there was Jeanne d'Arc, and others, too, he pondered, hazily. And this
talented girl Robin had found--a most unusual girl, who'd grown up in a
tenement like a flower among weeds, yes, he'd seen such flowers growing
amid rankest vegetation! She was not unlike Robin, herself. His mind
circled to Robin's own little fifth-floor nest and the horrible odors of
that dark stairway. Strange, extraordinary, that these two lives had
crossed. "This world's a queer world!" Both girls brought up in a
poverty that denied them all those jolly sort of advantages young girls
liked, and yet each sheltered by a mother's great love from the things
in poverty that coarsen and hurt. "Aye, a mother's love," and the little
lawyer thought of "Mother Lynch" with something very akin to reverence;
and of Jimmie, too, poor Jimmie, who, in his stumbling, mistaken way,
had tried to give a mother's love to Robin.
But suddenly the man aroused from his absorbed philosophizing and sat
bolt upright in bed. All right to think about letting down
barriers--whose barriers were they? Proud old Madame loved those
barriers--and she'd never accept, as Budge had, what Budge called the
"new ways.
Pages:
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284