"Utopia to Brass Tacks," was the slogan Barry's
chief had provided him with, he said. We were about the end of the
heroic age of the movement, the age of myths and saints and prophecies.
A transition was about due to smaller, more immediate things. The
quality of the leaders would probably change. The heroines of the last
three or four decades, women like Naomi Rutledge Stanton, to take a fine
type of them.
"She's my mother," said Rose.
Barry Lake's aplomb was equal to most situations, but it failed him
here; for a moment he could only stare. The contrast between the picture
in his mind's eye, of the plain, square-toed, high-principled and rather
pathetic champion of the Cause--pathetic in the light of what she hoped
from it--facing indifference and ridicule with the calm smile of one
who has climbed her mountain and looked into the promised
land,--between that and the lovely, sensitive, sensuous creature he was
staring at, was enough to stagger anybody. He got himself together in a
moment, said very simply and gravely how much he admired her and how
high a value, he believed, the future would put on her work; then he
picked up his sentence where Rose had broken it.
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