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This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of
seventeen from the educational care of an English gentlewoman
warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe,
and thrust her for the mornings and a moiety of the
afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but
competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down
town. She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern
independent of Mr. Grammont, because he feared his own people
wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages
and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned
casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a
trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent
of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical
Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a
commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had
really done responsible work.
But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even
for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party
he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an
improper familiarity with socialist ideas. This had produced
a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of
a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake. Gunter Lake, Sir
Richmond gathered, wasn't half a bad fellow. Generally it
would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of
speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake
had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his
behaviour under bad treatment. There was some story, however,
connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss
Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell. About that story
Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after
his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely
guessing.
So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated
up in fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond's
mind in the course of a day and a half. The fragments came up
as allusions or by way of illustration. The sustaining topic
was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under
scientific control, the Utopia of fully developed people
fully developing the resources of the earth. For a number of
trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the
project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and
presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was
justified in doing. It was true that Dr. Martineau had not
said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but
also it was true that they had not crystallized out in Sir
Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea
of a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh
rules of conduct and of different relationships between human
beings. And it throws those who talk about it into the
companionship of a common enterprise. To-morrow the New Age
will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure
of only a few human beings.
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