Part 24 (1/2)
”An unusual one.”
”And so you have an unusual proposition to make to me?”
”Yes, I suppose you will think so. There is a brand I want plucked from the burning--a Royal Commission saved from becoming merely official and useless.”
”What is its subject?”
”All this!”--she made an inclusive gesture--”slums, the conditions of sweated labor, the daily material which we have to work on.”
”About which you have taught me that I know really nothing.”
”You said you were anxious to learn. At least half of that Commission will be anxious not to learn--or not to let others.”
”Then you ought to be on it.”
”No woman is on it.”
”You wish them to be?”
She threw out her hands. ”What would be the use? Their voices would have no weight.”
”Whose would?”
”Yours,” she said; and, eyeing him full, stopped dead.
”You wish me to go upon that Commission?” cried Prince Max.
”Yes.”
”In spite of all my ignorance?”
”The sittings do not begin till late autumn; between now and then you could get more actual knowledge--brought home and made visible to you, I mean--than most of those who will form its majority.”
”Then you think I could be of use?”
She looked at him, silent for a moment. ”I think you have a mind capable of taking fire, when it learns the facts.”
”Facts only deaden some people,” said he.
”Yes; that is what crushes us here. We have such mountains of facts to deal with.”
”And you want fire to come down from those mountains and consume me?”
She nodded prophetically.
”I know you wouldn't run away.”
”I am trying to feel the call,” said Max a little skeptically. And in truth he was of divided mind, not because he had any doubt of his ability, but because the temptation to insincerity was so strong. This would give him the very opportunity he sought--through a vale of misery he beheld the way to his own Promised Land; but was it fair that he should take advantage of it without a heart of pity and conviction? This Prince of ours rather prided himself on his conscientious scruples.
”Will you tell me from the beginning,” he said at last, ”what put this thought into your mind? I seem to be getting it only by fragments.”