Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/323

 "She asked me what I was going to do, and I told her I was going to be a lawyer. I don't know where I got that ambition. She dried her hands on her apron without a word, and went up-stairs to her room, and when she came down she had two dollars that she'd saved—I don't know how. God! When I think of those hands and those two dollars!

"I didn't want to take them. She made me. I promised her I'd pay them back, and I've been trying to ever since, but I couldn't do it with a million.

"Funny thing. She kissed me sort of timidly, and there was a look in her eyes as if I had some resemblance to him that frightened her. You know what I mean. It made me hate him so that when I walked off down the road and he shouted at me from the field I didn't even answer him. He was plowing. It was chilly, and the steam was rising from the horses as they stood there at the end of a furrow. I remember yet that he and the horses looked small—like little figures in lead—and I felt that he was a stranger that I didn't know who he was. Can you explain that?"

I consider that incident illuminating because it really explains why Wickson became a reformer. Undoubtedly he transferred to the governing power of society the feeling that he had against his father, the governing power of his youth. He did it, of