I

ANNIE GRAHAM, the young woman with whom this story concerns itself, lived in a Western manufacturing town. Her home was, both inside and outside, like hundreds and thousands of other American homes, a cheap frame house, in a cheap, respectable suburb; a house without any other beauty or refinement than cleanliness and a certain amount of rather coarse comfort. Her father was a workingman, as his father had been before him. He was a gasfitter, and went to his work every morning with a greasy leather bundle under his arm, and a cheerful heart in his breast. First, because he had plenty of work and, having no imagination, never worried about the future. But mostly because of a comfortable fact to which, when not occupied with the practical details of his trade, he devoted his thoughts; the fact being that there was a certain tidy bit of money in the bank for his Annie,—money which he had hoarded up, little by little, saved out of car-fares, and tobacco, and clothes; money which meant privation and courage, and slow, persistent, heavy toil. It amounted to a little over fifteen hundred dollars, and he hoped it would be twenty-five hundred before he died. What Annie would do with it when he was gone was the only direction in which Johnny Graham’s fancy worked. Would she rent a better house, maybe, than this little one they had lived in since she was twelve; or would she get herself fine clothes or a piano or books? He thought that she would probably get books. Annie was so fond of reading! He was very proud of this fondness for reading, and used to tell his fellow-workmen about it, and say he had seen her turn over so many pages, in fifteen minutes by his watch. He timed her, he said, and my! but she was the fast reader! He had no idea of placing any restrictions upon the way in which she should spend her inheritance when she got it; he had no feeling about the money as anything but a means of future pleasure to Annie.

“When I’m dead and gone, the afternoon, maybe, of the funeral, they’ll tell her. ‘Annie Graham,’ the lawyer’ll say, ‘your father’s left you a tidy bit of money. It’s twenty-five hundred dollars,’ he’ll say; well, maybe it’ll be twenty-six hundred,—well, say three thousand. ‘Miss Graham,’ he’ll say, ‘here’s three thousand dollars.’ Well, Annie’ll jump. An’ it’ll comfort her,” Annie’s father would think many times a day, smiling, and screwing in his gas-fixtures with his blackened fingers, or scratching a match on his trousers, and hunting for leaks.

He had been father and mother to his little girl ever since his wife died, when Annie was five. He had baked and scrubbed and cleaned for them both when she was a child, and in his clumsy way he had sewed on buttons and darned rents and washed her little face and hands as tenderly as a woman could have done. And when she grew into a big girl and went to the grammar school, he still knew all about her hats and clothes; and he still tried to save her pretty hands, and sifted the ashes, and waited on her, and was proud of her just as he always had been. There was more than one hard-working woman neighbor who would have been willing to “make a good stepmother” to Annie, and who felt, in all honesty, that the gasfitter was spoiling his girl, and that she just only hoped nothing bad would come of it.

“Them girls that’s taken such care of,—well, the dear only knows what happens to them!” the neighbors said, with mysterious pursings of the lips. But so far nothing out of the way had happened to Annie. Nothing “bad” had come of the simple, faithful loving that the child had had.

Annie was eighteen. She was a fresh-looking girl, with an intelligent face, though a little serious for her years. Her placid gray eyes had a rather absent look sometimes, and there was a line on her white forehead that told of thought. Johnny Graham knew what that line meant. He knew with what intensity Annie had applied herself to her studies when she was in school, and how, after she had graduated, and had gotten a place as a “saleslady,” as Johnny expressed it, she still worked and toiled over her books whenever she could find time.

“But she’s mostly figurin’,” he told his friends proudly.

That Annie, at eighteen, had taught herself geometry, and had yearnings for the higher calculus, was a matter of burning pride to the gasfitter, though he had no idea what it was all about.

“I suppose now, Annie, you know all there is in the arithmetics on them subjects?” he said to her one night as he sat in his shirt-sleeves smoking his pipe by the kitchen stove, and looking at his daughter, who, with her pencil pressed against her lips, was frowning over a sheet of calculations. Annie gave a little start and looked up smiling.

“Why, father, dear, I don’t know anything—comparatively.”

“But, Annie, now what’s the good of them lines? Do you cut patterns on ’em? I seen a advertisement saying they’d show you how to cut out dresses on a chart. And there was a lot of them lines drawed on it.”

Annie came over and sat on his knee; she laughed, but she sighed, too.

“No; it’s just working them out that I like,” she said. “I guess I like studying; that’s it.”

“Well, you’re a real student, I guess,” he told her, and passed his rough, grimy hand over her soft hair. “Did I pull your hair?” he said, for it seemed as though she winced; but she only answered by taking his hand and kissing it, which made her father protest, and then cuddle her up in his arms and say, “Well, now, Annie, I think you’re a real scholar.”

They sat in the kitchen, but not because they had not a parlor, like everybody else. There was a best room behind the kitchen, and upstairs two bedrooms, and above them an attic, rented to Dave Duggan, a steady young workman who had lodged with them for nearly a year. Of course, obviously—propinquity being the root of love—he had a tenderness for Annie; and he was referred to by the women who were not Annie’s stepmothers as her “feller.” The parlor, in which the gasfitter rarely sat, was as frankly ugly as the outside of the small, narrow frame house. It had been furnished according to Mrs. Graham’s taste, and it had been religiously unchanged since her death. The tapestry carpet, with its monstrous roses and broad green leaves, had worn and faded into inoffensiveness, and the red rep furniture had suffered the same kindly change; but the knitted tidies were new, and the plush picture frames; and Annie had added the knots of china silk on the chair-backs; and on the wall there was a snow-shovel, painted and gilded and tied with pink satin ribbons, and also some decorated brass placques; on the mantelpiece were two little wooden shoes,—Dave Duggan’s gift,—gilded and adorned with blue satin bows, and used as match-boxes.

To Johnny Graham this terrible parlor stood for art and luxury. As for Annie, she did not know enough to find the snow-shovel painful, nor even the rolling-pin, another gift from Dave, which, covered with plush, hung from one corner of the mantelpiece. She merely thought of these things as “mother’s” and as “presents,” and valued them accordingly. But she would never have dreamed of occupying this fine room unless there was company; and, indeed, the kitchen was far more homelike.

She sat now nestling down against her father’s shoulder, listening to his story of the day’s work: the fine house on the hill where he had gone to mend a fixture; the nice young lady he had seen; and the toilet-table all covered with silver things.

“Why, Annie, now I tell you, there was brushes and combs made out of silver; and there was five little sorts of silver boxes, different sizes and shapes, hearts and rounds mostly. Didn’t seem to have nothing in ’em. I had to move ’em to get at the bracket. What do you suppose folks has such things for? Now a brush made out o’ silver is no sense; it’s heavy. Annie, now, would you like things like that?”

“Indeed, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Think of the trouble they’d be to keep clean.”

“Well, the help does that in them houses, I suppose,” he ruminated. “Annie, now, suppose you had a lot of money, would you buy them things?”

“Indeed, I wouldn’t!” Annie said again, laughing. “No, I know what I’d do. I heard a girl talking about it. There’s a college for girls somewhere in the East, just like there is for young men. I would go to that college and study. My! wouldn’t I study!”

That was the beginning of what some people called the tragedy of Annie Graham’s life, and some the success—it all depends on how you look at it.

Her chance remark about a girl’s college lingered in her father’s thoughts; Johnny Graham had not known that there were such things as women’s colleges. There were primary schools and high schools and “pay” schools, where he supposed the swells sent their children, but his knowledge never went farther than this.

“A college for girls!” Well, why not? He believed girls was smarter than boys any day in the year; anyway his Annie was. He thought about it constantly, when, to save something for that inheritance in the bank, he walked to and from his work; and he thought of it while he worked. He spoke of it, when he had the chance, in a tentative way to two or three persons for whom he was doing jobs of gasfitting. Did they ever hear anything of them girls’ colleges? What was they like? Did they cost money? Once, in the big morning-room of an old-fashioned house, he spoke to an old lady who sat by the fire while he screwed a lava tip on the burner over the mantelpiece. She was an old woman and rich, and so she ought to know about such things, Johnny Graham reasoned; so, with the respectful guilelessness of the American workman, he cleared his throat and said, he wondered, now, if she was knowing anything about girls’ colleges?

The old woman started, and seemed to see him for the first time, and put on her glasses to inspect him.

“What did you say, my good man?” she inquired.

Johnny, unoffended by this offensive term, which means, “you are not so good as I am,” repeated his question mumblingly, with the old lava tip between his lips.

“I have a girl I’m thinking of sending to one of them institutions,” he explained.

The old lady frowned and took off her glasses and tapped them on the arm of her chair.

“You will make a great mistake, my good man. It is a great mistake to educate your daughter above her position.”

Johnny took the lava tip out of his mouth and stared at her.

“Well, now, ma’am,” he said in his slow way, “I don’t see how you make that out. An American girl is an American girl; no matter how you look at it. You can’t educate her above that.”

Upon which the old lady nodded her head and said: “Yes, yes; of course; this is what I’ve always said; this is what we are coming to!”

And Johnny Graham rolled up his tools in his greasy leather apron, and went home, pondering deeply. He was not in the least angry at the old lady; he was simply incapable of understanding her. But that night he thought it over, and pointed out to himself that, after all, if Annie’s mind was set that way, there was no use in her waiting to spend her money till he was dead and gone.

“I’ll probably be livin’ twenty years yet,” he thought, after some calculation, “and Annie maybe would be too old for a girls’ college then. She’d better go now; and anyway it might be a good investment of the money; she might set up as a teacher, maybe, after she got learned. They do say Councilman Welch’s daughter got four hundred dollars for teachin’ in the Primary School; and that’s twenty per cent. interest on two thousand dollars; I believe it’s a good thing!”

It was then that Annie came in, looking, it chanced, a little pale, and, perhaps, a little wistful. Annie was not discontented; she had no aspirations; only the child was vaguely aware of an emptiness in her life. And she had stopped at the Public Library as she came home from her work, and had read an article in a magazine concerning a College for Women in another State.

“That’s what I’d do if I were rich,” she thought, as she walked home. “I’d go there and study.”

So she was a little absent, even when she kissed her father, and heard him tell all about the big house where the rich old woman lived all by herself, because she had quarreled with her only daughter.

“Seems strange, now, to quarrel with your children,” said Johnny, buttering his bread on the tablecloth, and then, tilting his chair back, eating it with great contentment.

After supper he told Annie what he had planned for her. Her amazement at her father’s wealth was almost as keen a delight to Johnny as was her impetuous refusal to use it, and her tears because he was “so good” to her; almost as keen a joy as her final yielding to the logic of his urging, that, after all, the family would be better off if she could teach, and earn a big salary. “Six hundred dollars, maybe,” he said, stretching his imagination for the purpose of convincing her.

So it was arranged. Annie Graham was to go away to study; she was to fit herself to be a teacher; she was to be educated into her father’s intellectual superior; she was to be raised “above her station.” Would it be a failure or a success? Would she be happy or most miserable? Would the little dull, loving, ignorant gasfitter hold or lose his girl?

Well, it all depends upon how you look at it.

The result of the talk that night was that in September Annie took the long and expensive journey East, and entered on her four years’ course of study.

Of course, there was no coming home for the holidays; the fifteen hundred dollars in the bank could not stand that; nor did she have to come back in the long vacation, which would have been a serious expense, for the president of the college, who was greatly impressed by the girl’s ability and character, permitted her to live in one of the college houses during the summer, and found for her an opportunity to teach some little children. She earned enough money to pay her board during those twelve weeks, and did not have to draw on the cherished bank account.

The beginning of that college life was a strange experience to Annie,—the quiet, refined atmosphere, the beauty of culture, the conception of spaciousness and dignity, and the awaking of that sense of fitness which is called conventionality. To Annie these things were like the opening of the eyes of one born blind. By degrees the small niceties of life revealed themselves to her,—the delicacies of serving, the delicacies of living, the delicacies of manner and voice and thought. She felt them all with a passionate sort of joy.

It is curious to observe that by the pure and virgin mind these things, which may be so worthless in their lifeless formality, are seen in their real and fundamental nobility, and are accepted with the instinct of religion. At first Annie was so normally unconscious of her antecedents that it did not occur to her to proclaim that all these things were new. And then, by and by, having eaten of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there came to her a certain deep spiritual experience; she recognized that the root of conventionality, the beginning of the sense of fitness, lay in character; therefore she knew no shame that her father ate with his knife, or sat in his shirt-sleeves, or did many unlovely things. She did not like them; but she knew no shame, only love. But it was then that, very simply, she took occasion to say that her father, who was a mechanic, had sent her here to college, so that she might be fitted to support herself by teaching. She said this because she recognized another point of view, and, recognizing it, felt a certain lack of straightforwardness in keeping silent; and also because she was proud of Johnny Graham. Then she forgot it. It was too unimportant to think of.

She assimilated all these new ideas, and felt them and lived them, as though she had been to the manner born. Her very face reflected them. She was almost a beautiful young woman. Her deep eyes looked out from under her straight, pure brows with a certain high directness of glance and tranquil self-poise which gave a sense of breeding which was inescapable. The fact that she had said that she was poor was only in its way another proof of her superiority—so some of the college-girls said, who went into schoolgirl ecstasies about her.

“You know it’s vulgar to be rich,” a young man told her one evening, as they talked together in the June dusk. It was Annie’s fifth year, and for the first time she was going home in the long vacation. A scholarship, and four summers of teaching some little children in a country house on the outskirts of the village, had meant that for the last two years Johnny Graham’s bank account had been recuperating, a very, very little; at all events, there had been no drain upon it.

And now Annie was going home. She had won the highest honors of her class, and had even been offered a position on the college staff, and her happiness was as frank as a child’s.

“In so many weeks I’ll see father. In so many days!”—she kept saying to herself. And now it had come to Saturday evening, and she was to start home on Monday. She was walking back from her little pupils’ house, where she had said good-by until September. She was not alone.

A certain Dick Temple, a cousin of her pupils’ mother, had a way of running down from town to spend Sundays with the Pauls, to play, he said, with the children, and get in some rowing on the river, and to exercise his cousin John’s polo ponies, and—to see Annie Graham.

But this last was not so stated in the bond.

He had a way of appearing in time to walk across the campus with her, after little Kate’s music lesson Saturday afternoon, and once or twice he had beguiled her into his boat, and they had gone floating down the river in the twilight, talking of everything in heaven and earth. Being young, religion had been their first theme; and then, by and by, love;—in the abstract, of course. A month ago, they both had feared themselves incapable of experiencing this beautiful emotion—Annie, because she was going to devote herself to study and her father; Dick, because he had outlived such things, and was very bitter and cynical and mysterious in his allusions to life, which, he said, “he knew.” Sometimes they talked of their future; and it was then that Annie had told him, smiling, that she had no such luxurious prospects as those which he had been outlining for himself,—travel, and study, and the philanthropic opportunities of great wealth.

They were walking slowly along under the great elms toward her door; it had rained earlier in the day, and the worn bricks of the narrow pavement held here and there shallow pools of water; the sun struck across the wet grass in a low flood of gold; and there was the scent of young leaves and roses in the air.

“We are poor people,” Annie had said, with an amused look; “I’m going to teach school and wear spectacles, and be very stern and learned.”

“Ah, well,” returned the young man, “it’s the thing to be poor nowadays; it’s awfully vulgar to be rich! It’s queer, now, when you think of it, Miss Graham, how many people in our class have lost their money, isn’t it?”

“We’ve never had it to lose,” Annie said; “the family fortunes are to rise on school-teaching.”

Dick glanced at her with quick admiration in his handsome young eyes. He was twenty-four, but he blundered over his words like a schoolboy.

“Miss Graham,” he said, “you won’t mind if I say I think it’s awfully fine in you, don’t you know, to teach, and all that sort of thing? Of course, girls do things now. I mean nice girls, don’t you know. Why, cousin Kate gave music lessons before she married; and she was a Townsend. Still, it’s people like that, don’t you know, that can afford to do things like that!”

“I don’t suppose any one can afford to be dependent,” Annie said simply, “and my father is really poor, Mr. Temple.”

Her beautiful direct look as she said this made the young fellow’s heart suddenly leap. He wanted to burst out and tell her how much he admired her; admired? no, loved her! That was the word. Yes, he, who had thought he had outlived all that sort of thing. All in a moment he felt that he wanted to tell her this; but she seemed so remote that he dared not speak.

“I suppose I ought to get my governor to go and call on hers,” he reflected; “these decayed gentlefolks are death on propriety. But maybe she wouldn’t look at me, anyway,” he added to himself, in a miserable afterthought; for she began to speak in such an interested way of some mathematical work she had to do that night, that he felt there was no room for him in her thoughts. He left her at the college door and went back, ardent and despairing, to confide in his cousin Kate, who, it must be admitted, had rather a startled expression when he told her he was “all bowled over by Miss Graham.”

“But, Dick, what would your father say if it got serious? Cousin Henry has such ideas, you know. She’s a charming girl, but we don’t know anything about her people.”

“We know they are poor,” Dick said boldly; “but that doesn’t matter in the least. Surely you are not so narrow, Cousin Kate, as to think it matters?”

“No, that doesn’t matter, of course,” cousin Kate said doubtfully.

As for Annie, she went, smiling a little, and blushing a little, upstairs to her room. But she did no work in higher mathematics that night.

Instead, she finished her packing, and wrote her last semi-weekly letter of the term to her father. To be sure, he would get it just a day or two before she came herself; but she would not have had Johnny Graham miss that Saturday letter for a good deal. She knew he would carry it about in his pocket, and read it over and over, and put it on the wooden chair beside his bed at night. Perhaps it was a little more affectionate, this last letter, than usual; she told him about the weather, and that she would start on Monday, and would telegraph him when to expect her. And something of the progress of her two pupils; and how she had made an experiment in the laboratory, and had burned her fingers; and—and that she had met an interesting man, a cousin of Mrs. Paul’s. He had taken her out rowing once or twice, she said. And, oh! she was so happy that she was coming home! She could hardly believe that it was true, she was so glad. And then she said she was always his little girl who loved him—“Annie.”

Then when it was written, she put her head down on her arms, folded upon her writing-table; there were tears in her eyes when she lifted it again.

“When he said ‘our class,’ ought I to have spoken?” she asked herself. “No, he must know; I told Mrs. Paul. No, no, I couldn’t!” And all her love and all her pride for her father rebelled against the slight to him which such a confession would have been; it would have seemed to imply that he was less gentle in soul than Richard Temple himself, or any one else.

Mr. Temple saw her at church the next day and walked home with her; although she kept all the while on Mrs. Paul’s right, while Dick had to walk on the outside and could only look across at her, which did not please him in the least. She did not talk to him very much, but she seemed to have a good deal to say to his cousin, which perplexed her adorer, for though he had a proper regard for the stout and estimable Mrs. Paul, he could not see why Miss Graham should talk to her with such apparent interest, when an intelligent young man was really eager for a look or a word. He heard her laughing a little about going home “like a stranger and foreigner,” she said.

“I haven’t seen South Bend for nearly five years; you know it is such an expensive journey.”

Mrs. Paul said yes, she supposed it was. “It takes four days and five nights to get there, doesn’t it? It seems to me I passed through it once. I suppose those Western places are very progressive, aren’t they? They are not shocked at the idea of a university education for women. One runs up against that here very often.”

Annie shook her head, smiling. “Isn’t it funny to think that people do really feel that it is unfeminine; ‘threatening to the womanly woman,’ as they say.”

“I’ve come to think that the ‘womanly woman’ means the brainless woman,” Mrs. Paul said.

“What fools people are who feel that way about the higher education of women,” Dick broke in. “It’s incredible! Miss Graham, I shall be passing through South Bend in a fortnight or so; may I call?”

“Of course; I shall be delighted to see you,” Annie said, “and my father will be so glad to see any friend of Mrs. Paul’s; he knows how kind you have been to me,” she ended, with an affectionate look at Dick’s cousin.

Then Mr. Temple, with an eager timidity so foreign to him that Mrs. Paul suppressed a smile with difficulty, wondered if Miss Graham would have time to go out on the river that evening? He knew she would be awfully busy; but it would be a heavenly evening on the river! He was so promptly assured that she should not have time that the poor fellow looked very blank; in fact, he was distinctly cross in the family circle for the rest of the day. At night he softened and tried to be amiable, for he was constrained to be confidential, and he knew that “Cousin Kate” would not hesitate to snub him unless he made himself agreeable.

“Now, really, don’t you think she’s very unusual?” he insisted, after having told Mrs. Paul all the pleasant things which he could remember that Miss Graham had said to him about her two little pupils.

“If you mean Miss Graham, why, yes, I do think she’s unusual, Dick.”

“Did you ever notice,” said the fatuous Dick, “how softly her hair grows around her forehead? And her eyes—what color are her eyes?”

“I’m sure I can’t say,” Mrs. Paul answered dryly. “Dick, would you mind going in and getting me a shawl? It’s rather cool out here on the terrace.” When he came back she had made up her mind how to proceed. “Now, Dick, listen, I’m not a snob, but”—

“If you are going to say anything about that beautiful creature’s working for her living,” Dick threatened, “you might as well stop on the spot.”

“Of course I’m not going to say anything about her working for her living; why should I? I worked for my living before I married John. You know I’m not a snob, but I do believe in class. I don’t mean to be unkind, and certainly she is a charming girl, and—ladylike. But—there is something, I can’t tell what it is—that seems as if she had not always been used to things”—

Dick Temple said something between his teeth, and his cousin flung her head up.

“Dick!”

“Well, it makes a man want to be emphatic, Cousin Kate,—such nonsense! Class? We’re Americans, thank the Lord! And talk about ancestors, I never saw descent so plainly. Look at the way she carries her head! And her voice, her manner! Darn it, because a girl’s poor”—

“Good-night, Richard,” said Mrs. Paul, rising with great dignity.

“Oh, hold on! Don’t get mad. Hold your base. I apologize; only, it seems pretty hard to be down on a girl”—

“You know I’m not down on her; I like her very much; I respect her very much.”

“Well, then, what’s the matter?” demanded Dick boldly.

“I don’t know. Only I have a vague recollection that when she came to teach the children she mentioned, in a casual sort of way, something about—about her home, or her father and mother, or something. I can’t really remember, but I know I gained the impression that she was”—

“Poor?” Dick burst in. “Of course she’s poor. She has never made any secret of that. Why should she? Only a cad would do that.”

“I don’t mean poor,” Mrs. Paul said, frowning. “I wish you would have some manners, Dick, and not interrupt. I merely mean that a young man has no right to pay attention to a girl in another class unless he means to follow it up. I despise a trifler, Dick.”

“You don’t despise him any more than I do,” Dick returned loftily. “But there isn’t any question of class here. We don’t have any higher class than hers; and as for ‘following it up,’ as you say—if a fellow thought there was any chance for him with that woman he’d follow it up quick enough, and ask her to marry him! Yes, and he ought to do it as formally as though she were a princess. She is a princess! He ought to go and ask her father if he might ask her. Her poverty, which seems to trouble you so much, Cousin Kate, has no bearing on the situation.”

Poor Dick was smarting with Annie’s apparent coldness and his cousin’s snobbishness—so he called it; but there was really no excuse for bursting out at Mrs. Paul in this way; and it was no wonder that she said good-night with some asperity, and went upstairs and told her husband that Dick was a perfect goose, besides being rather a cub.

“He’s twenty-four and old enough to know better,” she said. “Oh, dear, I do wish his father was here!”

“You’d better wish her father was here; then you’d know the pit whence she was digged,” John Paul said. “Of course, if he ever sold cotton by the yard, Dick’s future happiness would be imperiled.”

“Now, John, don’t be horrid,” said his wife impatiently; “you know perfectly well what I mean. I’m not a snob, as I told Dick, but there is such a thing as class.”

“If Dick’s worth anything,” pronounced John Paul, standing before his glass and ripping his collar off the stud with a vicious tug, “he’ll marry that girl if her father is a hod-carrier.”