Carnegie's Maid

by Marie Benedict

In her gaze, in such close proximity, I saw something familiar. Intelligence. Determination. Even grit perhaps. Something I didn’t expect in a lady. But something I knew very well from the eyes of my father. It was the quality that procured us a much larger farm than most one-acre tenancies. It was the grit that gave our family land enough for varied crops, which had been the key to our survival of the famine. A survival that now depended on me.

I knew I had no right to these tears. I

What did it say about society that the best a lowborn, educated girl could hope for was respectable servitude? It was as if all of Dad’s teaching gave me a glimpse into a world for which I longed but had no means of entering.

From this experience, I learned that when you’ve gone astray, a helping hand will always emerge from the darkness.”

bluntly about his ambitions. My voice rose as I said, “These old New York society people maintain that all people are not equal, that they are superior to all other classes. I thought you believed in freedom and opportunity for all people. That view is the antithesis of what these people espouse.”

Pedigree, an accident of birth, does not give a man the right to public respect.