Would you care to come for a little spin
"Would you care to come for a little spin?"
"I'd care like everything," I says; "but I can't go."
"No?" he says. "Yes, you can!"
"I'm not going," I says. "Thanks, though."
"Would you mind telling me why not?" he says. "Since you say you want to, you know."
I couldn't think of anything but the truth.
"I'm trying to act as nice as I can," I says, "since I've been to this school. And I guess it's nicer not to go with you."
His face was pleasant when he kept on looking at me, though he was laughing at me, too.
"Look here, then," he said, "will you go with my sister and me some day? As a favor to me, you know—so you'll get her here on time."
"Oh," I says, "I'd love to!"
"Done," he said. "Tell me your name, and I'll tell her we've got an engagement with her."
When he'd gone I jumped down from the wall and ran pell-mell up the hill. Before I knew it, I was humming. Ain't it the funniest thing how one little bit of a nice happening from somebody makes you all over like new?
Two days afterward I was leaving the dining-room when I saw Miss Antoinette Massy coming toward me. My heart begun to beat. She was so beautiful and dressed like a dream. She's always seemed to me somebody far off, and different—like somebody that had died and been born again from the way I was.
"You're Cosma Wakely, aren't you?" she said. "My brother told me about meeting you." I couldn't think of a thing to say. I just kept thinking how the lace of her waist looked as if it hadn't ever been worn before; and I noticed her pretty, rosy, shining nails. "I wondered if you wouldn't go for a motor ride with my brother, Gerald, and myself, to-morrow afternoon?"
"Oh," I says, "I could, like anything."
And all that night when I woke up, I kept thinking what was going to happen, and it was in my head like, something saying something. It wasn't so much for the ride—it was that they'd been the way they'd been to me. That was it.
I put on my best dress and my best shoesand my other hat; and when I met Miss Massy in the parlor I see right off that I was dressed up too much. She had on a sweater and a little cap. I always noticed that about me—I dressed up when I'd ought not to, and times when I didn't everybody else was always dressed up.
Her brother came in, and I hadn't sensed before how good-looking he was. If ever he had come to Katytown, Lena Curtsy would have met him before he got half-way from the depot to the post-office.
Up to then, this was my most wonderful school-day. But it wasn't the ride. It was because they were both being to me the way they were.
We stopped at a little road-house for tea. I hated tea, and when they asked me to have tea, I said so. I said I'd select pop. Going back, it was the surprise of my school life that far when Antoinette Massy asked me if I would go home with her at the end of the week.
"Oh," I says, "I can't! I can't!"
"Do come," she says; "my brother will run us down. You can take your work with you."
"Oh," I says, "it isn't that. I guess you don't understand"—I thought I ought to tell her just the truth—"I can't act the way you're used to, I'm afraid," I said. "I'm learning—but I had a lot to know."
She laughed, and made me go. I wondered why. But I couldn't help going. I thought of all the mistakes I'd make—but then, I'd learn something, too. "Just be yourself," Miss Antoinette said. And I said, "Myself buttered a whole slice of bread and bit it for a week before I noticed that the rest didn't." And when she said, "Yourself did not. You got that from other people in the first place," I asked her, "Then, whatismyself?" And she says, "That's what we're at school to find out!"
It was in a big house on the Hudson that the Massys lived. I saw some glass houses for flowers. When the door was opened I saw a lot more flowers and a stained glass window and a big hall fire.
"Oh!" I says. "Can farm-houses be like that?"
"What does she mean?" says Mrs. Massy, and shook hands with me. I wanted to laugh when I looked at her. She was little and thick everywhere, and she had on a good many things, and she looked so anxious! It didn't seem as if there was enough things in all the world to make anybody look so anxious about them.
Dinner was at half past seven. In Katytown supper is all over by half past six, and at half past seven the post-office is shut. I had a little light cloth dress, and I put that on; and then I just set down and looked around my room. There was a big bed with a kind of a flowered umbrella over it with lace hanging down; and a little low dressing table, all white and glass, and my own bath showed through the open door. And looking around that room and remembering how the house was, I thought:
"Oh, if Mother could have had things fixed up a little, maybe she could have been differentherself. Maybe then she'd have been Mother instead of 'Ma' from the beginning."
In the drawing-room were Mrs. Massy and Mr. Gerald, her looking like a little, fat, bright-colored ball, and him like a man on some stage—better than any man I'd seen in the Katytown opera-house attractions, even. The dining-room was lovely, and the table was like a long wide puzzle. I watched Miss Antoinette, and I done like her, word for word, food for food, tool for tool. They talked more about nothing than anybody I'd ever heard. Mrs. Massy would take the most innocent little remark, and worry it like a terrier, and run off with the pieces, making a new remark of each one. She had things enough around her neck to choke her if they'd all got to going. There were two guests, enormous women with lovely velvet belts for waists. They talked in bursts and gushes and up on their high tiptoes—I can't explain it. It was like another language, all irregular. I just kept still, and ate, and one or two things I couldn't comprehend I didn't take any of. Everything would havebeen all right if only one of the guests hadn't thought of something funny to tell.
"Elwell sounded the horn right in the midst of a group of factory girls to-night," she said. "We were in a tearing hurry and we didn't see them. And one of them stood still, right in the road, and she said, 'You go round me.' Why, she might have been killed! and then we should have been arrested. Elwell had all he could do to swing the car."
All of a sudden come to me the picture of those girls—the girls I knew, tracking home at night, dog-tired, dead-tired, from ten hours on their feet and going home to what they was going home to. I saw 'em with my heart—Rose and all the rest that I knew and that I didn't know. And the table I was to, and the lights and the glass, blurred off. Something in my head did something. I had just sense enough not to say anything, for I knew I couldn't say enough, or say it right so's I could make it mean anything. But I shoved back my chair, and I walked out the door.
In the hall I ran. I got the front door open,and I got out on the porch. I wanted to be away from there. What right did I have to be there, anyhow? And while I stood there with the wind biting down on me, all of a sudden it wasn't only Rose and Nettie and the girls I saw, but it was Mother, too—Mother when I'd used to call her "Ma."
Mr. Gerald was by me in a minute.
"Miss Cosma," he said, "what is it?"
He took my arm—in that wonderful, taking-care way that is so dear in a man, when it is—and he drew me back into the vestibule.
"If she speaks like that about those girls again," I said, "I'll throw my glass of water at her."
I hated him for what he said. What he said was:
"By jove! You are magnificent!"
It took all the strength out of me. "None of you see it," I said. "I don't know what I'm here for. I don't belong here. I belong out there in the road with those girls that the car plowed through."
"I don't know about that," he said. "Whydon't you stay here and teach me something about them? I don't even know what you mean."
He put me in a chair by the fire, and they sent me some coffee there. I heard him explaining that I felt a little faint. I wanted to yell, "It's a lie." I knew, then, that I was a savage—all the pretty little smooth things they used to cover up with, I wanted to rip up and throw at all of them.
"I hate it here," I thought. "I hate the factory. I hate home. I hate Luke...."
That was nearly everything that I knew; and I hated them all. Was it me that everything was wrong with, I wondered? I was looking down at Mr. Gerald's hands that had moved so dainty and used-to-things all the while he was eating. That made me think of Mr. Ember's hands when he was eating that morning at Joe's. These folks all did things like Mr. Ember. And I'd got to stay there till I knew how to do them, too. But from that minute I began to wonder why folks that can do things so dainty don't always live up to itin other ways, like it seemed to me he did. And then I got to thinking about his patience with me, so by the time the rest came in from the dining-room I was all still again.
When the guests had gone I was standing by some long curtains when Miss Antoinette walked over to me. "You lovely thing," she said. "By that rose curtain you are stunning. Stand still, dear. Gerald, look."
But I didn't think much about him; and my eyes brimmed up.
"You called me 'dear,'" I says. "You're about the first one."
She put her arm around me, and then it come out. Her brother had one wing of the ground floor all to himself. It was a studio. He painted. And he wanted to paint me. There was only one thing I thought about.
"I'll be glad to do that," I says, "if you'll both teach me some of the things you see I don't know—talking, eating, everything."
The way they hesitated was so nice for my feelings it was like having my first lesson then.
I went down there the whole spring. Andthere, and to the school, little by little I learned things. I knew it—I could almost feel it. I didn't always know what I'd learned, but I knew that it was changing me. I don't know any better feeling. It's more fun than making a garden. It's more fun than watching puppies grow. It was almost as much fun as writing my book. And back of it all was the great big sense, shining and shining, that I was getting more the way I wanted to be, that Ihadto be, if ever I was to seehimagain. John Ember was in my life all the time, like somebody saying something.
Pretty soon Miss Antoinette's maid put my hair up a different way. And Miss Antoinette had a nice gown of hers altered for me. I'll never forget the night I first put on that lace dress. We'd motored out as usual, on a Friday in May, when I'd been going there most three months. They were going to have a few people for dinner. I'd had a peep at the table, that looked like a banquet, and I thought: "Not a thing on it, Cosma Wakely, that you don't know how to use right. Wouldn't Katytownstick out its eyes?" And when Miss Antoinette's maid put the dress on me, I most jumped. I wouldn't have believed it was me.
I remember I come out of my room, loving the way the lace felt all around me. The hall was lighted bright down-stairs, and, beyond, some folks were just coming into the vestibule, in lovely colored cloaks. And all of a sudden I thought:
"Oh—living is something different from what I always thought! And I must be one of the ones that's intended to know about it!"
It was a wonderful, grand feeling; and it was surprising what confidence it gave me. At the foot of the stairs, one of the maids knocked against me with a big branched candlestick she was carrying.
"You should be more careful!" I says to her, sharp. And I couldn't help feeling like a great lady when she apologized, scared.
In the drawing-room the first person I walked into was Mr. Gerald. I'd been seeing him almost every week—usually he and MissAntoinette drove me down on Friday nights. But I'd never seen him quite like this.
"By jove! By jove!" he said, and bowed over my hand just the way I'd seen him do to other women. "Oh, Cosma!"
He'd never called me that before. I liked his saying it, and saying it that way. When I went to meet the rest, and knew he was watching me and that he liked the way I looked—instead of being embarrassed I thought it was fun.
And when it was Mr. Gerald that took me down, and we all went into that beautiful room, and to the dinner table that I wasn't afraid of—I can't explain it, but everything I'd ever done before seemed a long way off and I didn't want to bother remembering.
It was a happy two hours. After a while I began to want to say little things, and I found I could say them so nobody looked surprised, or glanced at anybody else after I had spoken. That was a wonderful thing, when I first noticed that they didn't glance at each other whenI said anything. I saw I could say the truth right out, if I only laughed about it a little bit, and they'd call it "quaint," and laugh too, instead of thinking I was "bad form." There was quite an old man on my right, and I liked that. I always got along better with them than the middle ones that wanted to talk about themselves.
Just as soon as the men came up-stairs, Mr. Gerald came where I was. He wanted me to go down the rooms to see a "Chartron." I thought it was some kind of furniture; but when I got there it was a picture of Miss Antoinette, and we sat down with our backs to it.
"How are you?" Mr. Gerald said—his voice was kind of like he kept boxes of them and opened one special for you. "Tell me about yourself."
"I feel," I said, "as if I'd been sitting on the edge of things all my life, and I'd just jumped over in. It's a pity you never were born again. You can't tell how it feels."
"Yes, I was," he said, "I've been born again."
"Well, didn't it make you want to forget everything that had happened to you before?" I said.
"It does," said Mr. Gerald; "and I have. You know, don't you, that I count time now from the day I met you?"
"Great guns!" I said.
It took me off my feet so that I didn't remember to say "My word," like they'd told me. I sat and stared at him.
He laughed at me. "You wonder!" he said. "They'll never spoil you, after all. Cosma,—couldn't you? Couldn't you?"
"Why, Mr. Gerald," I says, "I'd as soon think of loving the president."
"Don't bother about him," he says. "Love me."
Some more folks came in then to see the Chartron, and I never saw him any more that night till they were leaving. Then he told me Miss Antoinette was going back on Sunday, but he'd run me in town on Monday morning, if I'd go. I said I'd go.
It was raining that Monday morning, andeverything smelled sort of old-fashioned and nice, and the rain beat in our faces.
"Cosma," he said, "don't keep me waiting."
"Why not?" I said. I can see just the way the road went stretching in front of us. I looked at it, and I thoughtwhy not,why not.... I'd been saved from Katytown. I'd been saved from Luke, from Mr. Carney, from the factory. I'd been given my school, and now this chance.Why not?
"Because I love you so much that it isn't fair to me," he said.
And he thought he was answering what I had said, but instead he was really answering what I had thought.
"You like your new life, don't you?" he said. "Why not have it all the time, then? And if you love me, even a little, I can make you happy—I know I can."
"And could I make you happy?" I said.
"Gad!" said Mr. Gerald.
The road was empty in the soft beating rain. With the slow and perfectly sure way he dideverything he ran the car to the curb and turned to me.
"Cosma," he said.
I looked at him. Just a word of mine, and my whole life would be settled, to be lived with him, and with all that I began to suspect I was meant to have. I kept looking at him. I felt a good deal the way I had felt when I looked at a long-distance telephone and knew, with a word, I could talk a thousand miles. And I didn't feel much more.
He took me in his arms and drew my wet face close to his, that was warm, as his lips were warm.
"I want you for my wife," he said.
It seemed so wonderful that he should love me that I thought mostly about that, and not about whether I loved him at all. I sat still and said:
"I don't see how you can love me. There's so much I've got to learn yet, before I'm like the ones you know."
"You're adorable," he said; "you'reglorious. I love you. I want you with me always.... Cosma! Say maybe. Say just that!"
So then I did the thing so many girls had done before me and will do after me:
"Well, then," I said, "maybe."
He frightened me, he was so glad. I felt left out. I wished that I was glad like that.
But it was surprising how much more confidence I had in myself after I knew that a man like Mr. Gerald loved me.
"That's because," I said to me, "women have counted only when men have loved them."
And I thought that had ought to be different.
One day toward spring I went down to see Mrs. Bingy. She had three women in her room every day, making the lace. She had regular customers from the shops. When I went in she was in a good black dress and was sitting holding the baby, that was beginning now to talk.
"Oh, Cossy," she says, "look what I got," and pointed to some papers.
"Katytown papers," I said. "I don't suppose there's a soul there outside the family that I care whether I ever see again or not."
"Why, Cossy," she said, "there's Lena—"
"Lena Curtsy!" I said. "Good heavens! Mrs. Bingy, I wish you wouldn't call me 'Cossy.'"
"I always do forget the Cosma," she said humbly; "I'll try to remember better. But Lena Curtsy—Cossy, she's married to Luke."
"Good for them," I said; "and I supposethey had a charivari that woke the cemetery. That's Katytown."
"They've gone to housekeeping to Luke's father's," said Mrs. Bingy. "Don't you want to read about it, Cossy—Cosma?"
I took the paper. "Mrs. Bingy," I said, "I came down to show you my new dress."
"It's a beauty," she said. "I noticed it first thing when I see you. It must be all-silk." She examined it with careful fingers. "I made this of mine myself," she added, proud.
"Do you know anything about Keddie?" I asked her.
She begun to cry. "That's all that's the matter," she says. "The first money I earned I sent him enough to go and take the cure. The letter come back to me, marked that they couldn't find him. So I took the baby and run down to Katytown, and, sure enough, the house was rented to strangers and not a stick of furniture left in it. He'd sold it all off and went West. And me with the money to give him the cure, when it's too late. I ought," she says, "never to have left him."
"Mrs. Bingy," I says, "do you honestly believe that?"
"No," says she, "I don't. But it's a terrible thing to own up to. I saw your Ma in Katytown."
"Oh!" I says. "How is she? She don't write. She just wrote once and put in a dollar chicken money."
"They think you'll be back yet," Mrs. Bingy says. "Your Pa says, 'Her place is here to home with her Ma. Her Ma's getting along in years now, and she needs her to home, and she'd ought to come back.'"
"Why don't the boys come back?" I says.
"Oh, they're working," Mrs. Bingy says, surprised.
"So am I," I says. "Mrs. Bingy! Do you think I ought to go back?"
She leaned forward and spoke it behind her hand.
"No," she says, "I don't. But it's a terrible thing to own up to."
I went back to the school that Monday morning, wondering why it seems hard to own upto so many things that's true. If they're true, the least you can do is to own up to them, ain't it?
It was some time before this that I'd made up my mind to try for the Savage Prize. The Savage Prize was open to the whole school, and it was for the best oration given at a contest the week before commencement. I was pretty good at what I called speaking pieces, and what they called "vocational expression." And I had some things in my head that I wanted to write about. I'd decided to write on "Growing," and I meant by that just getting different from what you were, that my head was so full of. I had a good deal to say, beginning with that white god that I knew all about now. But Rose Everly didn't know. And I wondered why.
One day the principal called me in her office.
"Miss Spot has showed me the rough draft of your oration," she said. "It is admirable, Cosma. But I should not emphasize unduly the painful fact that there are many to whomgrowth is denied. Dwell on the inspiring features of the subject. Let it bring out chiefly sweetness and light."
"But—" I says.
"That will do, Cosma. Thank you," said the principal.
While I was working on the Savage Prize oration, trying to make it "all sweetness and light," Antoinette sent me a note, in history class.
"Jolly larks!" she said, "Friday. Dinner at the Dudleys' studio. Opera in the Dudleys' box. Our house for Sunday. Look your best. Baddy Dudley is back—You remember about him?"
"Jolly larks!" she said, "Friday. Dinner at the Dudleys' studio. Opera in the Dudleys' box. Our house for Sunday. Look your best. Baddy Dudley is back—You remember about him?"
Mr. Gerald had been promising to take us to the Dudleys' studio. Mr. Dudley's brother, "Baddy," spending that winter in Italy, had had a kodak picture of Antoinette and me and had sent me messages through Gerald.
On the night of the party I was dressing in my room at the school when a maid came up with a message. A girl was down-stairs to see me. My lace gown and a white cloak thatAntoinette had loaned me were spread on the bed. I was just finishing my hair and tying in it a gold rose of Antoinette's when my visitor came in. It was Rose Everly.
I'll never forget how Rose looked. She had on a little tight brown jacket and a woolen cap. Her skirt was wet and her boots were muddy. She stood winking in the light, and panting a little.
"My!" she said, "you live high up, don't you?" Then she stood staring at me. "Cosma," she said, "how beautiful!"
She dropped into a chair. In that first thing she said she had been the old Rose. Then she got still and shy, and sat openly looking at my clothes. She was not more than twenty-one, and the factory life had not told on her too much. Yet some of the life seemed to have gone out of her. She talked as if not all of her was there. She sat quietly and she looked as if she were resting all over. But her eyes were bright and interested as she looked at my dress.
I said, "People have been good to me, Rose. They gave me these."
"You're different, too," she said, looking hard at me. "You talk different, too. Oh, dear. I bet you won't do it!"
"Tell me what it is," I said, and put the lace dress over my head.
"It's the first meeting since the fire," Rose said. "I wanted you there."
I asked her what fire, and her eyes got big.
"Didn't you know," she said, "about the fire in our factory? Didn't you know the doors were locked again, and five of us burned alive?"
Didn't you know about the fire in our factory
"Didn't you know about the fire in our factory?"
I hadn't known. That seemed to me so awful. There I was, fed and clothed and not worrying about rent, and here this thing had happened, and I nor none of us hadn't even heard of it. Miss Manners and Miss Spot didn't like us to read the newspapers too much.
"It broke out in the pressroom," Rose said. "That girl that was feeding your old press—they never even found her."
"Oh, Rose," I said. "Rose, Rose!" And when I could I asked her what it was that she had come wanting me to do.
She made a little tired motion. "It ain't only the fire," she said. "Things have got worse with us. We've got three times the fines. Since they've stopped locking the doors, they make us be searched every night, and the new forewoman—she's fierce. And we can't get the girls interested. They say it ain't no use to try. We want to try to have one more meeting to show 'em there is some use. And we thought, mebbe—we knew you could make 'em see, Cosma. If you'd come and talk to 'em."
"When would it be?" I asked her.
"They've called the meeting for to-morrow night," she told me.
"To-morrow!" I said. "Oh, Rose—no, then I can't. I'm going out of town to-night, for two days, up the Hudson...."
I stopped. She got up and came to fasten my sash for me.
"I thought mebbe you couldn't," she said; "but it was worth trying."
"Have it next week," I said. "Have the meeting then."
But they had postponed once—some one,Rose said, had "peached" to the forewoman. For to-morrow night the men had loaned them a hall. She bent to my sash. I could see her in my glass. I was ashamed.
She told me what had come to the girls—marriage, promotion, disgrace. Two of them had disappeared.
"I'm so sorry," I kept on saying. Then the maid came to tell me the motor was there. I put on my cloak with the fur and the bright lining. It had made me feel magnificent and happy. With Rose there, I felt all different.
She slipped away and went out in the dark. The light was on in the limousine. Mr. Gerald came running up the steps for me. Antoinette was there already. I went down and got in. There was nothing else to do.
The drive curved back around the dormitory, and so to the street again. As we came out on the roadway, we passed Rose, walking.
I thought: "She's walking till the street-car comes." But I knew it was far more likely that she was walking all the way to her room.
At the Dudleys' studio I forgot Rose for alittle while. It was a great dark room with bright colors and dim lamps. Mrs. Dudley had on a dress of leopard skins, with a pointed crown on her head. There were twenty or more there, and among them "Baddy" Dudley. From the minute I came in the room he came and sat beside me. He was big and ugly, but there was something about him that made you forget all the other men in the room.
It was a wonderful dinner. When coffee came, the lights flashed up, a curtain was lifted, and Mrs. Dudley danced. The lights rose and fell as she danced, and with them the music. Every one broke into a low humming with the music. Then she sank down, and the lights went out, and we sat in the dark until she came back to dance again. "I shall never be happy," said Mr. Dudley as we sat so, "until I see you dance, in a costume which I shall design for you."
"Will you dance with me?" I asked him. That was the most fun—that I could think of things to say, just the way Lena Curtsy usedto—only now they were never the kind that made anybody look shocked.
"Make the appointment in the Fiji Islands or in Fez," he said; "and there I will be."
Mr. Gerald came and sat down beside me.
"Oh, very well, Massy—to the knife," says Mr. Dudley.
It was half after nine when we left for the opera. The second act had begun, which seemed to me a wicked waste of tickets. But even then Mr. Gerald had no intention of listening. He sat beside me and talked.
"Cosma," he said, "I'm about ten times as miserable as usual to-night. Can't you say something."
I said, "Tell me: Is that what they call a minor? Because I want those for my heaven."
"I want you for my heaven," Mr. Gerald observed. "Dear, I'm terribly in earnest. Don't make me run a race with that bally ass."
"Don't race," I said. "Listen."
"I am listening," said Gerald, "to hear what you will say."
All at once it flashed over me: Cosma Wakely, from a farm near Katytown! Here I was, loving my new life and longing to keep it up.
"You're right where you belong," he went on, "looking just as you look now. But you do need me, you know, to complete the picture."
It was true. I did belong where I was. By a miracle I had got there. Why was I hesitating to stay? If it had been Lena Curtsy, or Rose, I couldn't imagine them feeling as if all this belonged to them. It was true. There must be these distinctions. Why should I not accept what had come? And then help the girls—help Father and Mother. Think of the good I could do as Gerald's wife....
The music died, just like something alive. The curtain went down. And in the midst of all the applause, and the silly bowing on the stage, and the chatter in the box, I looked in the box next to ours. And there sat John Ember.
He was sitting very near me, leaning his arm on the velvet rail which divided the boxes. He was looking at the stage. Two young girls and a very beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, were with him. Save for his formal dress, he looked exactly as he looked when I had said good-by to him in Twiney's pasture.
I was terrified for fear he should turn and look at me. I longed, as I had never longed for anything, to have him turn and look. I shrank back lest I should find that I must speak to him. I was wild with the wish to lean and speak his name. What if he had forgotten? Not until I caught the lift of his brow as he turned, the line of his chin, the touch of his hand, already familiar, to his forehead, did I know how well I had remembered. And then, abruptly, I was shot through with a sweetness and a pride: The time had come! I could meet him as I had dreamed ofmeeting him, speak to him as I had hoped sometime to speak to him, as some one a little within his world....
"The bally trouble with opera—" Gerald was beginning.
"Please, please!" I said. "You talked right through that act, Gerald. Let me sit still now!"
Mr. Ember, his face turned somewhat toward the house, was talking to the woman beside him.
" ... the new day," he said. "Such a place as this gives one hope. For all the folly of it, some do care. Here is music—a good deal segregated, in a place apart, for folk to come and participate. And they come—by jove, you know, they come!"
The woman said something which I did not hear.
"Not as pure an example as a symphony concert," he said, "no. There they demand nothing—no accessories, no deception, no laughter—even no story! That is music, pure and undefiled, and, it seems to me, really socialized.There participation is complete, with no interventions. I tell you we're coming on! Any day now, the drama may do the same thing!"
He listened to the woman again, and nodded, without looking at her. That made me think of a new wonder—of what it would be to have him understand one like that.
"Ah, yes," he said, "there's the heartbreak. God knows how long it will be before these things will be for more than the few. This whole thing,"—his arm went out toward the house—"and us with it, are sitting on the chests of the rest of them. And that isn't so bad, bad as it is. The worst is that we don't even know it."
"But what is one to do?" she cried—her voice was so eager that I caught some of what she said. "What can one do?"
"Find your corner and dig like a devil," he said. "I suppose I should say go at it like a god. Only we don't seem to know how to do that—yet."
He sat silent for a minute, looking over the house.
"We don't even half know that the other fellow is here," he said. "The isolation in audiences is frightful. Look at us now—we don't even guess we're all on the same job." He laughed. "We need to unionize!"
Some one else came to their box and joined them. He rose, moved away, talked with them all. Then he came to his place again, very near me, and sat silent while the others talked. I could see his head against the velvet stage curtain, and his fine clear profile. But now it was as if I were looking at him down a measureless distance.
I looked down at my yellow dress and my yellow slippers, at my hands that were manicured under my long gloves. I thought of the things they had taught me, about moving and speaking and eating. I thought how proud I was that I had made myself different. And to-night, when I first saw him in that box, it was as if I had come running to him, like a little child with a few bangles—and I had thought I could meet him now, almost like an equal.
And I saw now that the girl who had sat there outside the Katytown inn and had eaten her peaches, and had tried to flirt with him, wasn't much farther away from him—not much farther away—than I was, there in the opera box in my yellow dress, with a year of school behind me. And my only chance to help in all this that he understood and lived was to go with Rose; and I had let that slip, so that I could come here and show off how well I looked, with my words—and my hair—done different.
The place where he lived every day of his life was a place that I had never gone in or guessed or dreamed could be. He was living for some other reason than I had ever found out about. And I had thought that I was almost ready to see himnow!
As far as I could, I drew back toward the partition, out of his possible sight. But I heard the last act as I had never heard music before—because I heard it as he was hearing it, as we all over the house might have been listening to it. I listened with him. And allthe anguish and striving in the world were in the music and the music's way of trying to make this clear. It said it so plain that I wondered all of us didn't stand up in our places and "go at it like gods."
Before the curtain, and in the high moment of the act, they came for us. Mrs. Dudley liked to go down and give her carriage number early, especially when a supper was on. So we went, and I left him there. I saw him last against the crude setting of a prison, with the music remembering back to what it had been saying long before.
There is nothing more wonderful in the world than the minute when all that you have always been seeing begins to look like something else. It happened to me when I sat down at our table at the Ritz-Carlton, a table which had been reserved for us and was set with orchids and had four waiters, like moons.
I sat between Gerald and Mr. Baddy Dudley.
I looked up at Gerald, and I thought, "You're very kind. I owe you a great deal. But isthisthe way you are? Were you like this all the time?"
Then I looked up at Mr. Baddy Dudley. I wanted to say to him: "Ugh! You're all locked up in your body, and you can't drop it away. Why didn't you tell me?"
Across the table was Mrs. Dudley, in flesh-pink and pearls. I thought of her dancing, inthe leopard skin and the pointed crown; and it seemed to me that she was dead, a long time ago, and here she was, and she didn't dream it herself.
Here and there were the others; they seemed to fill the table with their high voices and their tip-top speech and their strong, big white shoulders. They were so kind—but I wondered if otherwise they had ever been born at all, and what made them think that they had?
Of them all, Antoinette was the best, because she was just sketched—yet. She could rub herself out and do it nearly all over again; and something about her looked anxious and hopeful, and as if it was waiting to see if that wasn't what she would do.
Then I tried to look myself in the face. And it seemed to me as if I didn't find any of me there at all.
I ate what they brought me; I answered what they said to me. But all the time they were all as far off as the other tables of folk, and the waiters, whom I didn't know at all.And all the while I looked around the big white room, and up at the oval of the ceiling, and—"This whole thing, and us with it, is sitting on the chests of the rest of them," I thought. I wondered about Rose. If she walked, she must have got home about the time I got to the opera. Rose! She was real, and she was awake. She had come all that way to get me to help her to wake the rest. Was that what he meant by digging like a devil?
When we left the hotel, toward two o'clock, there was nothing to do but to motor on with the rest. When we reached the Massys', the time was already still, because it expected morning. The Dudleys and Mr. Baddy Dudley had come up with us. When at last I got the window open in my room, I was in time to see a little lift of gray in the sky beyond the line of trees on the terrace.
"The new day," I said. "The new day. Cosma Wakely, have you got enough backbone in you to stand up to it?"
It was surprising how little backbone it tookthe next afternoon. What I had to do was what I wanted to do. All the forenoon, no one was stirring. It was eleven before coffee came to our rooms. I had heard Mr. Dudley calling a dog somewhere about, so I had kept to my room for fear of meeting him. At one o'clock there were guests for luncheon. When they started back to town I told Antoinette that I wanted to go with them. I meant to get to Rose's meeting.
"Nonsense!" she said. "Have you forgotten dinner? And the dancing?"
I said that I was worried about my examinations, and that I wanted to get back. When I first came to the Massys' I would have told them the truth.
The long ride down was like a still hand laid on something beating. I liked being alone as much as once I had dreaded it.
We had been late in setting off. It was almost six o'clock when I reached the school. When I had eaten and dressed and was on my way to the hall, it was already long past the time that Rose had named for the meeting.
All the girls were in their seats. There were only Rose and one or two more on the platform. The hall was low and smoky. The girls were nervous about the doors, and questioned everybody that came in. The girl at the door began to question me when I went in, but Rose saw me.
"Let her come in," she called out. "She's our next speaker!"
And when I heard the ring in her voice, and saw her face and felt her hand close on mine, and knew how glad she was that I had come, I was happy. Happier than I had ever once been at the Massys'.
I went right up on the platform. And my head and my heart had never been so full of things to say. And the girls listened.
Did you ever face a roomful of girls who work in a factory? Any factory? But especially in a factory where, instead of treating them like one side of the business, the owners treat them like necessary evils? You wouldn't ever have supposed that the heads of the Carney factory were dependent the least bit on thegirls who did the work for them. You'd have thought that it was just money and machinery and the buildings that did the work, and that the girls were being let work for a kindness. I never could understand it. When the business needed more money, the owners gave it to it. When the machinery needed oil or repairs or new parts, it got them. When the buildings had to have improvements, they got them. But when the girls needed more light or air or wages or shorter hours or a cleaner place to be, or better safety, they just got laughed at and rowed at and told to learn their places, or not told anything at all. And more girls come, younger, fresher, that didn't need things.
"If I was only my machine," I had heard Rose say that night, "I'd have plenty of oil and wool and the right shuttles. But I'm nothing but the operator, and the machine has the best care. And if there comes a fire—the machinery is insured. But we ain't."
I have not much remembrance of what I said to the girls that night. There must have been a hundred of them in the hall. And I knowthat as I stood there, looking into their faces, knowing them as I knew them, with their striving for a life like other folks, there—suddenly ringed round them—I saw the double tier of boxes of the night before, and I heard his voice:
" ... This whole place here, and we with them, are on the chests of the others."
I had no bitterness. But I had the extreme of consciousness that I had ever reached—not of myself, but of all of us, and of the need of helping on our common growth. They were to stand together, inviolably together, for the fostering of that growth, I told them. An injury to one was an injury to them all—because they were together. And the employers of whom they made their demands were no enemies, but victims, too, who must be helped to see, by us who happen to have had the good fortune to be able to see the need first.
I remember how I ended. I heard myself saying it as if it were some one else speaking:
"I'm with you. You must let me plan withyou. But I can't plan with a few of you, when the rest don't care. I want you all."
When the evening was over, and I had found those I knew and met those whom I didn't know, and had set down my name with the list that grew before the door, made up of those who were willing "not to fight, but to help," I stood for a minute in the lower hallway with Rose.
"Oh, Cosma," she said, "I've got to tell you something. I done you dead wrong. I thought last night that you'd gone over—that you didn't care any more."
"I didn't," I said. "Ithadgot me—the thing that gets folks."
Next day I rehearsed my oration for the Savage Prize contest. When I'd finished, Miss Spot told me that I needn't practise it any more before her—just to say it over in my room through the three days until the contest was to take place.
"You deliver it as well as I could myself, Cosma," she said.
So I walked back to my room, tore up myoration, and set to work to write another. My head and my heart were full of what that other was to be. I had been beating and pricking with it all night long after the meeting.
Savage Prize Day was a great day at the school. We were given engraved invitations to send out. I sent mine to Mrs. Bingy and Rose and the girls in the factory. I knew they couldn't come; but I knew, too, they'd like getting something engraved. Only it happened that not only Mrs. Bingy came—Rose and the girls came, too. Handed to them with their pay envelope had been the notice to quit. Somebody had told the superintendent about that meeting. Six of the leaders were let out. I saw them all sitting there when I got up on the platform. And they gave me strength, there in all that lot of well-dressed, soft-voiced folks. They were dear people, too. Only they were dear, different. And they didn't understand anything whatever about life, the way Mrs. Bingy and Rose and I did. And that wasn't those folks' fault either. But they seemed to take credit for it.
Antoinette had an oration. Hers was on "Our Boat Is Launched; But Where's the Shore?" It told about how to do. It said everybody should be successful with hard work. It said that industry is the best policy and bound to win. It said that America is the land where all who will only work hard enough may have any position they like. It said that everything is possible. Everybody enjoyed Antoinette's oration. She had some lovely roses and violets, and all her relatives sat looking so pleased. Her father had promised her a diamond pendant, if she got the prize.
There was another on "Evolution." She said we should be patient and not hurry things, because short-cuts wasn't evolution. I wondered what made her take it for granted God is so slow. But I liked the way her bracelets tinkled when she raised her arm, and I think she did, too.
Then it was my turn. I hadn't said anything to Miss Spot about changing my oration. I thought if I could do it once to please them, I could do it again. I worked hard on mine,because the prize was a hundred dollars; and if Mrs. Carney wouldn't take it, I wanted it for Rose and the girls. I thought Miss Spot would be pleased to think I did it without any rehearsing. I imagined how she would tell visitors about it, during ice-cream.
I didn't keep a copy of it, but some of it was like this:
I decided to write about "Growing," because I think that growing is the most important thing in the world. I believe that this is what we are for. But some ways to grow aren't so important as others.For example, I was born on a farm near a little town. At first my body grew, but not my mind. Only through district school. Then it stopped and waited for something to happen—going away, getting married, et cetera. Soon I met somebody who showed me that my mind must keep on growing.It seems queer, but nobody had ever said anything to me about growing. All that they said to me was about "behaving." And especially about doing as I was told.Then I came to the city and I worked in a factory. Right away I found out that there the last thing they thought about was anybody growing. They thought chiefly about hurrying.Not a word was ever said about growing. And yet, I suppose, all the time that was our chief business.One day I went to the Museum, and I saw a large white statue of Apollo Belvedere. The other people there seemed to know about him. I didn't know about him, or any of the rest of the things; and I went outside and cried. How was I to get to know, when nobody ever said anything to me about him? Or about any of the things I didn't know. I wasn't with people who knew things I didn't know. Or who knew anything about growing.Then I came to this school. I've been here and I've learned a great deal. Countries and capitals and what is shipped and how high the mountains are, and how to act and speak and eat. I know that you have to have all these. But I am writing about some education that shows you how to be on account of what life is. And about how to arrange education so that every one can have it, and not some of us girls have it, and some of us not have anything but the machines....
I decided to write about "Growing," because I think that growing is the most important thing in the world. I believe that this is what we are for. But some ways to grow aren't so important as others.
For example, I was born on a farm near a little town. At first my body grew, but not my mind. Only through district school. Then it stopped and waited for something to happen—going away, getting married, et cetera. Soon I met somebody who showed me that my mind must keep on growing.
It seems queer, but nobody had ever said anything to me about growing. All that they said to me was about "behaving." And especially about doing as I was told.
Then I came to the city and I worked in a factory. Right away I found out that there the last thing they thought about was anybody growing. They thought chiefly about hurrying.Not a word was ever said about growing. And yet, I suppose, all the time that was our chief business.
One day I went to the Museum, and I saw a large white statue of Apollo Belvedere. The other people there seemed to know about him. I didn't know about him, or any of the rest of the things; and I went outside and cried. How was I to get to know, when nobody ever said anything to me about him? Or about any of the things I didn't know. I wasn't with people who knew things I didn't know. Or who knew anything about growing.
Then I came to this school. I've been here and I've learned a great deal. Countries and capitals and what is shipped and how high the mountains are, and how to act and speak and eat. I know that you have to have all these. But I am writing about some education that shows you how to be on account of what life is. And about how to arrange education so that every one can have it, and not some of us girls have it, and some of us not have anything but the machines....
I hadn't meant to say much about this. But all of a sudden,—while I stood there speaking to that dressed-up roomful, with all the girls down in front soft and white, and taken careof and promised diamond pendants, it come over me—the difference between them and Rose and the girls there on the back seats. And before I knew I was going to, I began to get outside my oration as I planned it, and to talk about those girls, and about where did their chance come in.... And I finished by begging these girls here, that had every chance to grow, to do something for the other girls that didn't have a chance to grow and never would have a chance.
"I don't know why you have it and why they don't," I said. "Maybe when we grow up and get out in the world we'll understand that better. But it can't be right the way it is. And can't we help them?"
Some clapped their hands when I was done. There was another oration on "Success," and one on "Opportunity," and then came the judges' decision.
It was a big disappointment. I thought the other orations were so wishy-washy, it didn't seem possible mine could have been any moreso. But it must have been, because only one of the judges voted for me. He said something about "not so much subject matter as originality of thought." The other two judges voted for Antoinette. That night, by special delivery, she got her diamond pendant.
Rose wrote a note on the back of her program. "Oh, Cosma, this is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to the girls. I never knew anybody else ever heard about us or cared about us. We'll never forget."
When I got back to the dormitory, somebody was waiting for me in the reception-room, and it was Gerald. He drew me over to a window, talking all the way.
"Cosma," he said, "by jove, I never heard anything like that. I say—how did you ever get them to let you do it?... They'd never seen it? Rich—rich! You sweet dove of an anarchist, you—"
"Don't Gerald," I said.
"Ripping," said he, "simply ripping! I never saw anything so beautiful as you before all that raft. You looked like the well-known angels,Cosma. And you ought to see my portrait of you now! You dear!"
"Don't, Gerald," I said.
He stared at me. "I say—you aren't taking to heart that miserable hundred dollars! Cosma dearest! Oh, I'm mad about you ... this June, ... this June—"
"Please, please, Gerald," I said. "Don't you see? Those girls there to-day. They're your sort and your people's sort. I'm not that...."
He set himself to explain something to me. I could see it in his sudden attitude. "Look here, Cosma," he said; "don't you understand the joy it would be for a man to have a hand in training the girl he wants to have for his wife?" At that, I looked at him with attention. "Let me be," he went on, "your teacher, lover, husband. Gad, think what it will be to have the shaping of the woman you will make! Can't you understand a man being mad about that?"
I answered him very carefully. "A man, maybe. But not the woman."
"What?" said Gerald blankly.
"I'll make myself," I said. "And then maybe I'll pick out a man who has made himself. And if we love each other, we'll marry."
"But," he said, "the sweetness of having you fit, day after day, into the dream that I have of what you are going to be—"
So then I told him. "Gerald," I said, "I wasn't meant to live your life. I've got to find my job in the world—whatever that is. I've got to get away from you—from you all—from everybody, Gerald!"
"Good heavens!" he said. "Cosma, you're tired—you're nervous—"
I looked at him quite calmly. "If," I said, "when I state some conviction of mine, any man ever tells me again that I'm nervous, I'll tell him he's—he'sdrunk. There's just as much sense in it."
I gave him both my hands. "Gerald," I said, "you dear man, your life isn't my life. I don't want it to be my life. That's all."
Afterward, when I went up-stairs, with that peculiar, heavy lonesomeness that comes fromthe withdrawal of this particular interest in this particular way, I wondered if the life I was planning was made up of such withdrawals, such hurts, such vacancies.
And then I remembered the way I had felt when I walked home from the meeting that Sunday night; and it seemed to me there are ways of happiness in the world beside which one can hardly count some of the ways of pleasure that one calls happiness now.
In my room that night I found a parcel. It was roughly wrapped in paper that had been used before. From it fell a white scarf and a paper.
"Dear Cossy(the letter was written in pencil) I am going to send you this whether you get the prize or whether you don't. If you didn't get it, I guess you need the present worse. It's the nubia I wore on my wedding trip. I sha'n't want it any more. I enclose one dollar and your Pa sends one dollar to get you something with for yourself. With love,"Ma."P. S. My one dollar is egg money, so it's my own it ain't from him I raised them."
"Dear Cossy(the letter was written in pencil) I am going to send you this whether you get the prize or whether you don't. If you didn't get it, I guess you need the present worse. It's the nubia I wore on my wedding trip. I sha'n't want it any more. I enclose one dollar and your Pa sends one dollar to get you something with for yourself. With love,
"Ma.
"P. S. My one dollar is egg money, so it's my own it ain't from him I raised them."
Suddenly, as I read, there came over me the first real longing that I had ever had in my life for Katytown, and for home.
One more incident belonged to Savage Prize Oration Day.
Neither Miss Manners nor Miss Spot said anything to me about my oration. But in commencement week Mrs. Carney came in to see me.
"Cosma," she said, "I have a letter here which I must show you."
I read the letter. It said:
"Dear Mrs. Carney:"After due consideration we deem it advisable to inform you that in our judgment the spirit and attitude of Cosma Wakely are not in conformity with the spirit of our school."We have ever striven to maintain here an attitude of sweetness and light, and to exclude everything of a nature disturbing to young ladies of immature mind. Cosma is not only opinionated, but her knowledge and experience are out of harmony with the knowledge and experience of our clientèle. We have regretfully concluded to suggest to you, therefore, that she be entered elsewhere to complete her course."Thanking you, my dear Mrs. Carney, we beg to remain,"Respectfully yours,"Matilda Manners,"Emily Spot."
"Dear Mrs. Carney:
"After due consideration we deem it advisable to inform you that in our judgment the spirit and attitude of Cosma Wakely are not in conformity with the spirit of our school.
"We have ever striven to maintain here an attitude of sweetness and light, and to exclude everything of a nature disturbing to young ladies of immature mind. Cosma is not only opinionated, but her knowledge and experience are out of harmony with the knowledge and experience of our clientèle. We have regretfully concluded to suggest to you, therefore, that she be entered elsewhere to complete her course.
"Thanking you, my dear Mrs. Carney, we beg to remain,
"Respectfully yours,"Matilda Manners,"Emily Spot."
I drop five years—so much in the living, so little in the retrospect!
Upon that time I entered with one thought: The university. At the school I had always been ahead of my class, a meager enough accomplishment there. I had browsed through the books of the third- and fourth-year girls, glad that I found so little that I could not have mastered then. Now, at Mrs. Carney's suggestion and with her help, I took some tutoring; and, what with overwork and summer sessions and entering "special" once more, I made the university, and, toward the close of my fifth year, was nearing my graduation. A part of my expenses I had paid myself. And how did I do that? By making lace for Mrs. Keddie Bingy!
Life is so wonderful that it makes youafraid, and it makes you glad, and it makes you sure.
In the first year after I left Miss Spot and Miss Manners, I read in one of the papers that John Ember had gone to China on an expedition which was to spend two years in the interior. I wouldn't have believed that the purpose could have dropped so completely out of everything—school, town, life, I myself, became something different. Until then I had not realized how much I had been living in the thought that I was somewhere near him; that any day I might see him in the street, in the cars, anywhere. It was hard to get used to knowing that somebody coming down at the far end of the street could not possibly be he; that no list of names in the paper could have his name.
But just as, that first morning, I knew that he wouldn't want me to give up and cry, so now I knew that I had to go ahead anyway, and do the best I could. It was what he would have wanted. And I had only just begun to make myself different. I had only just shownmyself how much there was, really, to be different about.
It was wanting to see him so much that made me take out my book again, after a long lapse, and read it over. The first pages were just as I wrote them, on the wrapping-paper that came around the boys' overalls. Then there were the sheets of manila paper that I had bought at the drug store near the first little room that Mrs. Bingy and I took—I remember how I had got up early and walked to the factory one morning to save the nickel for the paper. Then a few pages that I had made at the school on empty theme books; and some more on the Massys' guest paper, gray with lavender lining and a Paris maker's name. Now I went on writing my book with a typewriter that I was learning to use, since a man on Mrs. Bingy's floor let me borrow his machine when he went out in the mornings. My whole history was in those different kinds of paper in my book.
Those typewritten pages are of interest chiefly to myself. They are like the thirtypages that I threw away because they told only about my going from one factory to another. Only now the typewritten pages were not about events at all, but about the things that went on in me. And those I can sum up in a few words: For the important thing is that in those pages I was recording my growing understanding of something which Rose, out of her sordid living, had done so much to teach me: that my life was not important just because it was the life of Cosma Wakely alone, but it was important in proportion as it saw itself a part of the life about it—the life of school, of working women and men, of all men and women, of all beings. I began to wonder not so much how I could make my own individual "success," whatever that means, as how I could take my place in the task that we're all doing together—and of finding out what that task is.
That, in short, is what those years meant to me. The incidents do not so much matter. Nobody gets this understanding in the way that any one else gets it. It is the individualquest, the individual revelation. Experience, education, love, the mere wear and tear of living, all go toward this understanding. Most of all, love. I think that for me the university and the entire faculty were only auxiliary lights to the light that shone on me, over seas and lands, from the interior of China!
Of all the wonder learned by loving, no wonder is more exquisite than the magic by which one absent becomes a living presence. This man had so established himself before me that it seemed to me I knew his judgments. The simplicity of this new friend of mine, the mental honesty of that one, the accuracy of a third who made me careful of my facts—these John Ember would approve. I always knew. The self-centering or pretense of others; I knew how he would smile at these, shrug at them, but never despise them, because of his tender understanding of all life. Everybody with whom I was thrown who was less developed than I, I understood because I had been Cossy Wakely. Every one who was more developed, I tried passionately to understand.These, and books, plays, music, "society's" attempt to amuse itself, Rose and the factory, the whole panorama of my life passed every day before the still tribunal of this one man, who knew nothing about them.
The two years' absence of the expedition to China lengthened to three years, and it was well toward the close of the fourth year when Mrs. Carney told me he might be turning home. But the summer and autumn passed, and I heard nothing more. January came, and I was within a few months of graduation.
Then something happened which abruptly tied up the present to my old life.
I came home from class one afternoon to Mrs. Bingy's flat and found on the table a letter for me. It was from Luke, in Katytown.
"Dear Cossy[the letter said], I hate to ask you to do something, but you're the only one. Lena's gone.... She left this letter for me. I send it so you'll know. And she's gone. It says she's in the city. I ain't got the money to go there with. Cossy, could you find her? I thought maybe you could find her. She's got some folks there and I think maybeshe'll go there. It's an awful thing. I hate to ask you but you are the only one please answer.Luke."
"Dear Cossy[the letter said], I hate to ask you to do something, but you're the only one. Lena's gone.... She left this letter for me. I send it so you'll know. And she's gone. It says she's in the city. I ain't got the money to go there with. Cossy, could you find her? I thought maybe you could find her. She's got some folks there and I think maybeshe'll go there. It's an awful thing. I hate to ask you but you are the only one please answer.
Luke."
The address which he sent me was far uptown, and it took me over to a row of tenements near the East River. It was dark when I left the subway station. And when I found the street at last it smelled worse than the Katytown alleys in summer.
In the doorway of what I thought was the number I was looking for, a man and a woman were standing. I asked if this was the address I wanted, and the woman answered that it was.
"Isn't it Lena?" I said.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"It's Cossy," I answered.
"Yes, I know. What do you want?" she asked again.
I told her that I would wait up-stairs for her, and then the man went away, and she came with me. We climbed the stairs and went along a hall to a parlor that smelled of damp upholstery. She lighted a high central gas-jet that flared without a burner.
She had always been pretty, and she was that now, though her face had lines made by scowling. Her neck and shoulders and breast were almost uncovered, because her waist was so thin and so low-cut. Her little arms were bare from above the elbow, and her little features looked still smaller under a bright irregular turban with a feather like a long sword.
"Luke asked me to find you," I said. "He said he didn't have the money to come himself."
"Poor Luke," said Lena unexpectedly. "He's got the worst of it. But I can't help it."
"You've just come up for a little while, though, haven't you?" I asked her. "And then you're going back?"
She shrugged, and all the bones and cords of her neck and chest stood out. The shadow of her feather kept running over her face, like a knife blade.
"What's the use of your talking like the preacher?" she said. "You got out yourself."
"Yes," I said, "but—"
"You knew before and I didn't know tillafter," she added. "That's all. I couldn't stand it, either."
I sat still, wondering what to say.
"We moved in there with his mother and father," Lena said. "His father was good to me; but he was sick and just one more to take care of. His mother—well, I know it was hard for her, but she was bound I should do everything her way. She was a grand good housekeeper—and I ain't. I hate it. She got the rheumatism and sat in her chair all day and told me how. I tell you I couldn't stand it—"
Her voice got shrill, and I thought she was going to cry. But she just threw back her head and looked at me.
"And now in seven months," she said, "something else. That was the last straw. I says now I'd never get out. I've come up here for the last good time I may ever have. If Luke won't take me back, he needn't. I don't care what becomes of me anyway."
"Oh, Lena," I said.
"Don't you go giving yourself airs," shesaid. "You got away. We've heard about your school and your smartness. But supposin' you hadn't. Do you think you'd have stayed in Luke's mother's kitchen slavin'?"