Margaret drew a quick breath. Here--here under the very shadow of the Dome, a drunken, brutish man who could neither protect his children nor take care of himself, was given rights to those children that the mother could not share--could not share and could not shake off! Unless--unless the bill should pass! She leaned back in the carriage and closed her eyes.
In the office she lost no time in circumlocution.
"Judge Kirtley," she asked, cutting short his protestations of surprise at seeing her, "is it true that if this joint guardianship bill passes it will not give me Philip?"
"Give you Philip? Why, child--my _dear_ child, you haven't supposed--God bless my soul," he broke off abruptly. The idea that her ignorance of the law should have misled her into supposing that the bill would help her personally, except so far as it might influence the decision of the court when her case came up, had never occurred to him. She had thrown herself headlong into this movement without asking advice from anybody, but he had supposed that it was from her rather natural sympathy for womankind, and he had welcomed it as a diversion to her in the trying time of awaiting action by the court. In fact, he had encouraged her efforts. He was wondering now blankly if that encouragement had not been ill-judged.
"It would not help me in any way?" she persisted, reading the answer in his disturbed face. He answered her plainly then, though with a lawyer's caution.
"The fact that such a bill had been passed after much agitation might have its effect upon the decision of the court when your case comes up. I should not say that that would be impossible, nor even improbable. But that is the only way in which it could affect it. A law like that would not be retroactive. It is better for you to know this now, Margaret."
She sat so long without speaking that he began nervously to dread a break-down or an outburst such as she used to give way to. He had no need to fear. The woman before him was not the girl of those tempestuous days. No school develops us so swiftly as sorrow's school. With the little nunnery maid who talked with Guinevere, she had learned
"to cry her cry in silence, and have done."
"But it would help other women, in years to come," she said at last in a voice that thrilled with feeling--"women who cannot fight for themselves--" the woman of the street was before her--"who do not have a friend like you to fight for them?"