. Arena magazine - Volume 40. great effort to concen-trate on the statistics he was giving me—so many children sent, so many francsexpended, so many days passed, so muchaverage increase in weight per child, etc. But, strange to say, the vision of thatsame hat, again intruded itself betweenme and him as he talked, and as he, stim-ulated by my apparent interest, enlargedon the subject, giving me statistics of othercantons, and other years, I kept thinkingabout hats bought at different seasonsand in other countries—hats that Iremembered, with a shudder, had notbeen bargains—for which I had paidth
. Arena magazine - Volume 40. great effort to concen-trate on the statistics he was giving me—so many children sent, so many francsexpended, so many days passed, so muchaverage increase in weight per child, etc. But, strange to say, the vision of thatsame hat, again intruded itself betweenme and him as he talked, and as he, stim-ulated by my apparent interest, enlargedon the subject, giving me statistics of othercantons, and other years, I kept thinkingabout hats bought at different seasonsand in other countries—hats that Iremembered, with a shudder, had notbeen bargains—for which I had paidthe full market price, for the name sewedon the inside and for that indescribableair, on the outside, which gives to thewell-dressed woman what Emerson calls that sense of inward peace which relig-ion is powerless to bestow. But this,time, neither the thought of my clothes,nor my religion, brought me any religion seemed to be mocking me,and those hats fairly haunted me. They Digitized by VjOOQLC An Awakening. 46S. •AN AWAKENING.—THE HOME OF THE VACATION COLONY. piled themselves up, in my memory, onehigh above the other; such quantitiesthere were—several every year—and theyseemed to arrange themselves in the formof a monument—one huge monument fora lot of little graves—of children whoselives might have been saved with a partof the money which had gone for thosehats! I got up suddenly, interrupting Mon-sieur S—-—, for, from thinking of hats,I was getting started on dressmakersbills, and I felt that I would go crazy if Ibegan to calculate how many children•could have been sent to the country forthe price of one Paris gown. He wasjust concluding: It is hard to draw theline taut, and refuse little pinched chil-dren, for lack of a small sum, for you seehow far a littler money can be made to goin this work. Yes, I answered slowly, as I fin-ished some tentative scribbling on the back of my check-book, I see—onechild for one month at one franc a day:thir
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