Theft: A Play In Four Acts. Джек Лондон
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confusion, awkwardly.) I was unaware that I – that I was looking at you – in any way that —
Margaret
I'll tell you why you are here. Because I sent for you.
Knox
(With signs of ardor.) I would come whenever you sent for me, and go wherever you might send me.
Margaret
(Reprovingly.)
Please, please – It was about that speech. I have been hearing about it from everybody – rumblings and mutterings and dire prophecies. I know how busy you are, and I ought not to have asked you to come. But there was no other way, and I was so anxious.
Knox
(Pleased.) It seems so strange that you, being what you are, affiliated as you are, should be interested in the welfare of the common people.
Margaret
(Judicially.) I do seem like a traitor in my own camp. But as father said a while ago, I, too, have dreamed my dream. I did it as a girl – Plato's Republic, Moore's Utopia– I was steeped in all the dreams of the social dreamers.
(During all that follows of her speech, Knox is keenly interested, his eyes glisten and he hangs on her words.)
And I dreamed that I, too, might do something to bring on the era of universal justice and fair play. In my heart I dedicated myself to the cause of humanity. I made Lincoln my hero-he still is. But I was only a girl, and where was I to find this cause? – how to work for it? I was shut in by a thousand restrictions, hedged in by a thousand conventions. Everybody laughed at me when I expressed the thoughts that burned in me. What could I do? I was only a woman. I had neither vote nor right of utterance. I must remain silent. I must do nothing. Men, in their lordly wisdom, did all. They voted, orated, governed. The place for women was in the home, taking care of some lordly man who did all these lordly things.
Knox
You understand, then, why I am for equal suffrage.
Margaret
But I learned – or thought I learned. Power, I discovered early. My father had power. He was a magnate – I believe that is the correct phrase. Power was what I needed. But how? I was a woman. Again I dreamed my dream – a modified dream. Only by marriage could I win to power. And there you have the clew to me and what I am and have become. I met the man who was to become my husband. He was clean and strong and an athlete, an outdoor man, a wealthy man and a rising politician. Father told me that if I married him he would make him the power of his state, make him governor, send him to the United States Senate. And there you have it all.
Knox
Yes? – Yes?
Margaret
I married. I found that there were greater forces at work than I had ever dreamed of. They took my husband away from me and molded him into the political lieutenant of my father. And I was without power. I could do nothing for the cause. I was beaten. Then it was that I got a new vision. The future belonged to the children. There I could play my woman's part. I was a mother. Very well. I could do no better than to bring into the world a healthy son and bring him up to manhood healthy and wholesome, clean, noble, and alive. Did I do my part well, through him the results would be achieved. Through him would the work of the world be done in making the world healthier and happier for all the human creatures in it. I played the mother's part. That is why I left the pitiful little charities of the church and devoted myself to settlement work and tenement house reform, established my kindergartens, and worked for the little men and women who come so blindly and to whom the future belongs to make or mar.
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