Then there was the family tradition that Mary was the quicker, the brighter of the two, and that hers could be no common lot.  Frieda was relied upon for help, and her sister for glory.  And when I failed as a milliner’s apprentice, while Frieda made excellent progress at the dressmaker’s, our fates, indeed, were sealed.  It was understood, even before we reached Boston, that she would go to work and I to school.  In view of the family prejudices, it was the inevitable course.  No injustice was intended.  My father sent us hand in hand to school, before he had ever thought of America.  If, in America, he had been able to support his family unaided, it would have been the culmination of his best hopes to see all his children at school, with equal advantages at home.  But when he had done his best, and was still unable to provide even bread and shelter for us all, he was compelled to make us children self-supporting as fast as it was practicable.  There was no choosing possible; Frieda was the oldest, the strongest, the best prepared, and the only one who was of legal age to be put to work.

My father has nothing to answer for.  He divided the world between his children in accordance with the laws of the country and the compulsion of his circumstances.  I have no need of defending him.  It is myself that I would like to defend, and I cannot.  I remember that I accepted the arrangements made for my sister and me without much reflection, and everything that was planned for my advantage I took as a matter of course.  I was no heartless monster, but a decidedly self-centered child.  If my sister had seemed unhappy it would have troubled me; but I am ashamed to recall that I did not consider how little it was that contented her.  I was so preoccupied with my own happiness that I did not half perceive the splendid devotion of her attitude towards me, the sweetness of her joy in my good luck.  She not only stood by approvingly when I was helped to everything; she cheerfully waited on me herself.  And I took everything from her hand as if it were my due.

The two of us stood a moment in the doorway of the tenement house on Arlington Street, that wonderful September morning when I first went to school.  It was I that ran away, on winged feet of joy and expectation; it was she whose feet were bound in the tread-mill of daily toil.  And I was so blind that I did not see that the glory lay on her, and not on me.

* * * * *

Father himself conducted us to school.  He would not have delegated that mission to the President of the United States.  He had awaited the day with impatience equal to mine, and the visions he saw as he hurried us over the sun-flecked pavements transcended all my dreams.  Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before, had been his application for naturalization.  He had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the earliest moment allowed by the law, he