III
Edith Forge was growing along with Nathan, but saucer-eyed and awkward. At school they nicknamed her “Yard-sticks” and the insinuation made her furious. Nevertheless, despite her ungainliness, she was the worst “boy-struck” girl in town.
The day that she was twelve and Johnathan came upon her giggling with an unknown boy in an empty Sunday-school room, the sex prohibition went promptly into effect for Edith also. But between Nathan and his sister was this difference: a certain sense of self-discipline and proclivity toward law, order and obedience, strong in the boy, was utterly lacking in the girl. She possessed instead a “terrible temper.” She didn’t propose to forego the most interesting subject on earth, Boys, not a little bit. She “had a tantrum” and for the first and only time in her life Johnathan Forge thrashed her. Thereupon—when the neighborhood had been duly edified and quieted—Edith went promptly into illicit alliance with the brother.
“You help me to sneak out and I’ll help you!” she bargained.
In her studies, Edith had the academic mentality of a child of eight. But at thirteen she knew how to dance better than that “questionable” Miss La Mott, the village teacher. And at fourteen Edith was insisting that school would never do her any good anyhow, and she wanted to go to work “sticking eight-point” in the local newspaper office “to buy herself some rags that looked decent.”
Her mother prevailed upon her to stay in school by the compromise of filching money from the father’s trousers after he had retired. They tore holes in the man’s pockets so he would believe he lost the money. The petty loot went to purchase ribbons, waists, high-heeled shoes and two-dollar bouquets from Higgins’s greenhouse for Edith to wear to twenty-five-cent parties.
Early in the girl’s life it was expected that ultimately Edith would “marry money.” That was quite the natural and rational solution for every conjugal and domestic woe; Edith must marry money.
Not that Edith especially merited the good fortune of marrying money. Simply that if Edith were thus clever enough to land a husband of means, the girl’s family might turn parasites and dip their penurious hands into son-in-law’s golden pile.
It is always a daughter or a sister whom a family hold up when it wants funds. Never conceded, yet always recognized, when a boy of means marries a girl without means, he likewise marries her family. What are blood ties for? Why else have we daughters, being poor in purse as well as in spirit?
Of course Edith would have nothing to give such a wealthy husband but her bovine body; the mind of the girl is always a thing passed over. So Edith’s education, begun at twelve by a work-gnarled, disappointed, narrow-visioned mother, had solely to do with making her body attractive and planning what would be done with the Unknown’s cash when it was secured.
Edith “met boys” at school, she “met boys” at church; she also “met boys” on the streets. Half the parents in town at some time or other took note of those clandestine meetings and opined wrathfully, “If that Forge girl was mine, I’d lambaste her good and plenty,” well knowing they would do nothing of the sort. Because under the jurisdiction of other parents, Edith’s sex proclivities would probably have been diverted into normal, healthy channels.
Edith “never did a stroke of work at home.” It was Mrs. Forge’s contention that daughter must be “saved” from it and not get her hands all hard and red or her face lined with premature care, or she wouldn’t be attractive to Money.
So Mrs. Forge “slaved and drudged” and was always too tired at night to go anywhere or do anything but retire into the front room and rock in the dark. Edith, like the Dresden Doll, toiled not, neither did she spin. She fussed and fumed in the morning and was always late to school. She “never ate her meals” properly at noon, and after school she was either off on the edge of town, fire-playing with her latest short-trousered “catch,” or sprawled on the couch devouring Charlotte Braeme, Bertha M. Clay or Laura Jean Libby. At fourteen she knew more than most women know on their wedding night and what she didn’t know she was reasonably willing to learn.
So Edith whiled away the shining hours around the calendar and Johnathan Forge ruled over a painfully moral household.
It is notable, however, that his moral responsibility to God for Edith’s soul didn’t cause him a quarter of the fuss he made over Nathan’s.