Free The Hope Chest by Karen Schwabach Page A

preparations for the trip to Tennessee. This involved a lot of copying down of addresses, sorting notebooks and law books, and laying in supplies of postage stamps and telegraph forms.
    Miss Burns found a few adult dresses that could be cut down to size for Myrtle and Violet. She also found a frightful plaid school dress with a double row of fat black buttons down the front and a black patent leather belt three inches wide, which unfortunately fit Violet perfectly. Violet got a neck ache and a backache and felt like an old woman after twelve straight hours of sewing to make the dresses fit. She could tell from Myrtle's expression that she felt the same, but in the end they each had a pair of very serviceable dresses. Violet would still rather have had overalls, but the suffrage women had explained that you couldn't look strange when you were trying to bring people around to your point of view.
    “That just gives them an excuse not to listen to you,” Miss Dexter said. “You wait and wear overalls after we've won the vote.”
    She said this with a frown at Myrtle and then a side-long look at Miss Paul. Violet and Myrtle knew what this was all about. Miss Paul had no objection to Mr. Martin, Violet, and Myrtle going to Tennessee, but Miss Dexter had an objection—specifically to Myrtle. Violet had thought at first that Myrtle was overreacting in thinking this, but now she saw that it was true.
    “Don't you have people in Washington?” Miss Dexter had asked Myrtle, rather pointedly, at the dinner table the evening after they arrived. “Didn't you say you were from D.C. originally?”
    “They're all dead, ma'am,” said Myrtle. “Like I told you before. My mother died in the Influenza, and my father died digging the Panama Canal.”
    “Well, what about the people who sent you to school in New York?” Miss Dexter pressed, brushing past Myrtle's dead parents without comment.
    “The church ladies that packed me off to the Girls' Training Institute?” Myrtle retorted. “Oh, right. I'm so grateful to them, ma'am.”
    “Miss Dexter, tell the girls about New Hampshire, where you come from,” Miss Burns interceded desperately.
    The long oaken benches of the waiting room at Union Station seemed to disappear in the enormous, echoing arched chamber.
    “The waiting room is ninety feet high and was modeled after the Baths of Diocletian,” said Miss Dexter.
    “He must've been pretty dirty,” Myrtle muttered, and Violet laughed. The hall wasn't dirty, of course—it was spotless.
    “It is the largest railway waiting room in the world,” Miss Dexter pointed out.
    That perhaps explained why it seemed so empty, Violet thought. There were people in it, but they were dwarfed by the enormous arched ceiling. But most of the wooden benches were empty. Violet would have liked to get up and walk on them, turn at the curved seat at the end, and then walk back along the other side. But of course a young lady couldn't do that sort of thing.
    The suffragists had rented their own train car, called a tourist car, which made the tickets to Tennessee much cheaper. There were some spare seats, because a few people—including Miss Burns and Miss Alice Paul—had decided not to go. The suffragists had agreed to take Violet and Myrtle and Mr. Martin along, and Violet had the impression that Mr. Martin had given them some money.
    They were a jolly crowd boarding the train—even rowdy, Violet thought. Some wore sashes of green, white, and purple, or gold, white, and purple, or green and gold—all of these colors symbolized support for woman suffrage. Some of the women had badges and medals, and when Violet looked closely, she saw that some of the badges said that the women had gone to jail for the cause, and others said
Hunger Striker.
These were women whohad picketed the White House in snowstorms, and been in jail, and starved themselves for woman suffrage. A group of them joined arms and sang:
    Oh, we troubled Woody Wood as we stood,
as we