Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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It was in these changing, unquiet moods that she met Garwood. She had found that about the only practical outlet for the aspirations of women, in her time and country, was in the direction of charitable work. An unusually severe winter in Grand Prairie had made many opportunities for efforts of this nature, and she found a special pleasure in going about in the poorer quarter which lay beyond Railroad Avenue, hardly a block from the respectable homes of the well-to-do. The pleasure she derived from this new work was largely subjective; perhaps, as it is likely to do, it ministered to her spiritual vanity as much as to anything else. In the end, her emotional appreciation of the picturesque in poverty led her into indiscriminate giving. This new phase of her development did not increase her favor in the eyes of her neighbors. They resented her activity as foolish and meddlesome; the poor—to whom, in the delusion common to all the thoughtless rich, they gladly attributed unbounded good health—could get along all right, they said, if they would only work and save their money; or, as they preferred to express it, be industrious and frugal.