THE OTHER M A RGARET
493
Margaret had only one question to ask. "The
conductor?"
she
cried with desperate emphasis.
And when Lucy said that it was indeed the conductor, Mar–
garet said nothing, but shrugged her shoulders in an elaborate way
and made with her hands a large grimace of despairing incomprehen–
sion. She was dismissing the grownups by this pantomime, appealing
beyond all their sad nonsense to her own world of sure right reason.
In that world one knew where one was, one knew that to say things
about Jews was bad and that working men were good. And
therefore.
Elwin, whose awareness was all aroused, wondered in tender
amusement what his daughter would have felt if she had known that
her gesture, which she had drawn from the large available stock of
the folk-culture of children, had originally been a satiric mimicry of
a puzzled shrugging Jew. The Margaret who stood there in sullen–
ness was so very different from the Margaret who, only a few minutes
before, had looked at the picture with him and had seemed, almost,
to be teaching him something. Now he had to teach her. "That isn't
a very pretty gesture," he said. "And what, please,
is
so difficult
about Lucy's story? Don't you believe it?"
A mistake, as he saw at once. Margaret was standing there trap–
ped-no, she did not believe it, but she did not dare say so. Elwin
corrected himself and gave her her chance. "Do you think Lucy
didn't hear right?"
Margaret nodded eagerly, humbly glad to take the way out that
was being offered her.
"We studied the transit system," she said by way of explanation.
"We made a study of it." She stopped. Elwin knew how her argu–
ment ran, but she herself was not entirely sure of it. She said ten–
tatively, by way of a beginning, "They are underpaid."
Lucy was being really irresponsible, Elwin thought, for she said
in an abstracted tone, as
if
she were musing on the early clues of an
interesting scientific generalization, "They hate
women-it's
women
they're always rude to. Never the men." Margaret's face flushed, and
her eyes darkened at this new expression of her mother's moral ob–
tuseness, and Elwin felt a quick impatience with his daughter's sen–
sitivity-it seemed suddenly to have taken on a pedantic air. But he
was annoyed with Lucy too, who ought surely be more aware of
what her daughter was feeling. No doubt he was the more annoyed
because his own incident of the bus was untold and would remain un–
told. But it was Lucy who saved the situation she had created. She
suddenly remembered the kitchen. She hurried out, then came back,
caught Margaret by the arm in a bustle of haste and said, "Come
