"Already she has written hundreds of letters on the subject, to individuals and to clubs who have influence, and I am to help her with hundreds more. We are to send one to each member of the Legislature. I think it is great fun to be mixed up with 'affairs of State,' and I shall feel so grand having a hand in writing to senators and representatives. I'm going with her to some of the near-by towns to take photographs of the worst places. We're to have a collection representing every town and city in the State, and mount them on large posters for the public to see. That part of the work will be intensely interesting. I don't mind pounding away at the typewriter from daylight till dark, but I must confess to you what I'll not tell any one at home. The other part of the work, the contact with the suffering and misery and dirt that we see daily simply makes me sick.
"I asked _Orphant Annie_ how he supposed a dainty little woman like Mrs. Blythe stands it, and he said she had answered that question herself in a poem that she had written by request for the Riverville _Herald_. I was so surprised to know that she is a poet too, that he said he'd look up the verses for me. He did, and brought me a copy of them when he came that night at dinner. He doesn't seem as pop-eyed now that I know him better, and he says some very bright things occasionally. This is the poem. I am sending it so that you'll see how mistaken I was at first in assuming that Mrs. Blythe was just a kind-hearted little social butterfly, who had taken up housing betterment as a fad. Some of the divine fire that inspired the great reformers of all the ages must burn in her soul, or she couldn't have written this poem that she calls _The Torch_.
"'Make me to be a torch for feet that grope Down Truth's dim trail; to bear for wistful eyes Comfort of light; to bid great beacons blaze, And kindle altar fires of sacrifice!
"'Let me set souls aflame with quenchless zeal For great endeavors, causes true and high. So would I live to quicken and inspire, So would I, thus consumed, burn out and die.'
"Mr. Berry says that is just what Mrs. Blythe is, a torch to set others aflame. He has heard her talk to clubs and societies about her work, and he says that she is so convincing that before the summer is over she'll have me blazing like a house afire, the biggest beacon in the bunch. But I don't think much of _Orphant Annie_ as a prophet. It is just one of his ways of always saying the gobelins'll git you. I know they'll never get me to the extent of making me 'speak in meetin'.' Now you know just what it is I have gone into, and can picture the daily life quite accurately of Yours as ever, Mary Ware, late of Lone-Rock, now Reformer of Riverville."