She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such an
attempt to do good. If she had escaped this effect she was willing to
leave the rest with Providence.
VIII.
The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's traditions would naturally
form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were
abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that
they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful
humility. However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from
a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they
would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she
had been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was in arguing their
attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of
argument, with her perspective. They had not the means, intellectual or
moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had remained at home on the
farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment
of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres,
and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would
never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest.
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