



Produced by David Widger






PRAY YOU, SIR, WHOSE DAUGHTER?

By Helen H. Gardener


R. F. Fenno & Company

9 and 11 East 16th Street

New York

1892


I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep she dreampt Life stood before her,
and held in each hand a gift--in the one Love, in the other Freedom. And
she said to the woman, "Choose!"

And the woman waited long; and she said: "Freedom!" And Life said, "Thou
hast well chosen. If thou hadst said, 'Love,' I would have given thee
that thou didst ask for; and I would have gone from thee, and returned
to thee no more. Now, the day will come when I shall return. In that
day I shall bear both gifts in one hand." I heard the woman laugh in her
sleep.

Olive Schreener's Dreams.



DEDICATED

With the love and admiration of the Author,

To Her Husband

Who is ever at once her first, most severe, and most sympathetic critic,
whose encouragement and interest in her work never flags; whose abiding
belief in human rights, without sex limitations, and in equality of
opportunity leaves scant room in his great soul to harbor patience with
sex domination in a land which boasts of freedom for all, and embodies
its symbol of Liberty in the form of the only legally disqualified and
unrepresented class to be found upon its shores.




PREFACE.

In the following story the writer shows us what poverty and dependence
are in their revolting outward aspects, as well as in their crippling
effects on all the tender sentiments of the human soul. Whilst the many
suffer for want of the decencies of life, the few have no knowledge of
such conditions.

They require the poor to keep clean, where water by