Page:The Millbank Case - 1905 - Eldridge.djvu/162

 His face hardened in turn to a strange resemblance to her own.

"You have nothing to do with such a woman as that, mother."

"Every woman has to do with another who is being oppressed and wronged. Why is the dead past of that woman to be laid bare to the world? Are the years since her wrongdoing to count for nothing? Is this generation, that has grown up since all this happened, to be the judge of what she did before it was born? Is my son to be the one to allow the wrong?"

This new phase of his mother's character struck him strangely and not pleasantly. She was not wont to show large sympathy with her sex, though he would be far from accusing her of hardness or cruelty. Still she had left with him the impression of sympathies and feelings that were rather masculine than feminine; the impressions of one who, accepting the task of fighting her own way in the world, felt it no injustice or wrong to impose the same on others.

"I have no wish, mother, to hunt down this or