Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 100, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1910 — THE OTHER SIDE. [ARTICLE]

THE OTHER SIDE.

(Inlet, Monotonous Life May Ham Its Unsuspected Compensation. It was actually said of her, “What can there be worth'living for in a ltfe like that?” After all, perhaps it was not so strange. She was a plain little German woman, past middle age, frail in health, living with a married sister, and helping in the household tasks In payment for her board. She had returned to Germany a few months before after an absence of fifteen years. Those fifteen years she had spent as a governess in America. Before that she had supported an old mother and an invalid sister at home. A dreary, gray, colorless existence, there had been no room in it for a lover, scarcely'for friendß. Probably she had never had a care-free “good time” in her life. Hester March, looking after her that May morning, felt a fierce surging of anger, as,if lives like that challenged her own eager, pleasure-filled days. She was Impatient of sorrow, as youth always is—confident, as youth should bo. She would not let life serve, her, she thought, passionately. She would have wrestled with destiny and snatched some gift from it, or died in the conflict. She was contemptuous over an easy content —people ought not to be content with nothing. Hester’s companion, an older woman, smiled curiously. “What is worth living for?” she askdd. r “Joy,” the girl cried, “love, power, doing something in the world —making yoUrself felt somewhere! The men have the best of it —oh, I wish I were a man!—hut still in this age there are ways enough for any woman with a will. I’ve no patience with women who sit down and fold their hands before fate.” “Do you remember,” Miss Sanger spoke slowly, her eyes upon the distant hills, “the account in the papers before you left home of the coming into her fortune —I believe it is estimated at twenty millions —dt James Carew’s daughter, and what she did with it? She began by building a clubhouse for women in one of the tenement districts, with rooms where girls can meet young men socially—and safely. Now she is planning an apart-ment-house for working girls who earn no more than ten dollars a week —a place where they can keep house co-operatively, two, three, half a dozen together. This, too, will have several social rooms, with a housemother in charge. Besides this, she is actively interested in many of the efforts at social betterment as well as in educational and missionary work. Is this your idea of living?” Hester’s eyes were shining. Her friend needed no answer. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder how James Carew’s daughter should be spending her life and her money in this way? When she was a child of 6 her father obtained a governess for her. For fifteen years the governess lived with her, talked with her, poured herself into her pupil’s life. When she was 21 the task was over, and the two separated, the girl to go out into life, the governess to go back to her people. The last night they were together the governess said: __ “I have given the best of my life to you. I trust it to you from this day. You know our ideals. It/ is yours to make them live or to destroy them forever.’ “Julia Carew told me of it with tears in her eyes. ‘lt is not I that am doing it,’ she said; *it is Fraulein Liebschutz.’ ” “Fraulein Liebschutz!” the girl echoed, with a startled glance down the road. Miss Sanger smiled. “Isn’t is possible sometimes that we look at the wrong side of the tapestry?" she asked.—Youth’s Companion.