CHAPTER VIII -Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed

Daughter to fuss about and advise and scold a little. I’m tired of being a good fellow! I want to be a personage. I want to be reckoned with. I want to do some of the things I’m capable of doing. Why should you have everything, just because you’re a man, and I nothing, because I’m a woman? Why should you have your profession, and your books, and your clubs–” Von Gerhard interrupted quietly. “Ah, you are like the rest, after all. I thought you different–bigger, somehow. You want what all women want.”

But as I looked into his face, I saw that what he had said in bitterness he now regretted. “Forget that I’m a woman,” I pleaded. “Just think of me as a human being. Treat me as you would a man. I don’t want to be like the rest–not really, in my heart. But I’m tired of being on the outside of things. And now, will you shake hands?”

We shook hands, very solemnly, in the middle of the street. And the light from the electric light made my amber beads look like drops of blood, although we could not know that then.