He rose, lifting his great length in sections, and slouched over to the girl who still cowered against the door. His big-knuckled brown hands fastened on her forearms, and when she shrank from his touch he nodded with satisfaction. “Good big muscles, even if she is a skinny little runt. I always say these skinny, wiry little women can beat the fat ones all hollow.”
“Sally is strong and she’s marvelous with children. We’ve never had a better worker than Sally, and since she’s been raised in the Home, she’s used to work, Mr. Carson, although no one could say we are not good to our girls. I’m sure you’ll find her a willing helper on the farm. Did your wife come into town with you this afternoon?”
“Her? In berry-picking time?” Mr. Carson was plainly amazed. “No, mum, I come in alone. My daughter’s laid up today with a summer cold, or she’d be in with me, nagging me for money for her finery. But you know how girls are, mum. Now, seeing as how my wife’s near crazy with work, what with the field hands to feed and all, and my daughter laid up with a cold, I’d like to take this girl here along with me. You know me, mum. Reckon I don’t have to wait to be investigated no more.”
Mrs. Stone was already reaching for a pen. “Perfectly all right, Mr. Carson. Though it does put me in rather a tight place. Sally has been taking care of a dormitory of nineteen of the small girls, and it is going to upset things a bit, for tonight anyway. But I understand how it is with you. You’re going to be in town attending to business for an hour or so, I suppose, Mr. Carson? Sally will have to get her things together. You could call for her about five, I suppose?”
“Yes, mum, five it is!” The farmer spat again, rubbed his hand on his trousers, then offered it to Mrs. Stone. “And thank you, mum, I’ll take good care of the young-un. But I guess she thinks she’s a young lady now, eh, miss?” And he tweaked Sally’s ear, his fingers feeling like sand-paper against her delicate skin.
“Tell Mr. Carson, Sally, that you’ll appreciate having a nice home for the summer—a nice country home,” Mrs. Stone prompted, her eye stern and commanding.
And Sally, taught all her life to conceal her feelings from those in authority and to obey implicitly, gulped against the lump in her throat so that she could utter the lie in the language which Mrs. Stone had chosen.
The matron closed the door upon herself and the farmer, leaving Sally a quivering, sobbing little thing, huddled against the wall, her nails digging into the flesh of her palms. If anyone had asked her: “Sally, why is your heart broken? Why do you cry like that?” she could not have answered intelligently. She would have groped for words to express that quality within her that burned a steady flame all these years, unquenchable, even under the soul-stifling, damp blanket of charity. She knew dimly that it was pride—a fierce, arrogant pride, that told her that Sally Ford, by birth, was entitled to the best that life had to offer.
And now—her body quivered with an agony which had no name and which was the more terrible for its namelessness—she was to be thrust out into the world, or that part of the world represented by Clem Carson and his family. To eat the bitter bread of charity, to slave for the food she put into her stomach, which craved delicacies she had never tasted; to be treated as a servant, to have the shame of being an orphan, a child nobody wanted, continuously held up before her shrinking, hunted eyes—that was the fate which being sixteen had brought upon Sally Ford.
Every June they came—farmers like Clem Carson, seeking “hired girls” whom they would not have to pay. Carson himself had taken three girls from the orphanage.