"I'll never count on doing anything again," said Mellony, in a voice she tried to make cold and even, but which vibrated notwithstanding,—"never, so long as I live. I'll never think, or plan, or—or speak, if I can help it—of what I mean to do. I'll never do anything but just work and shut my eyes and—and live, if I've got to!" Her voice broke, and she turned her head away from the open window and looked straight before her into the shadowed room. Her mother moved uneasily, and her knotted hands grasped the arms of the stiff chair in which she sat.
"Mellony," she said again, "you've no call to talk so."
"I've no call to talk at all. I've no place anywhere. I'm not anybody. I haven't any life of my own." The keen brutality of the thoughtlessness of youth, and its ignoring of all claims but those of its own happiness, came oddly from the lips of submissive Mellony. Mrs. Pember quivered under it.
"You know you're my girl, Mellony," she answered gently. "You're all I've got."
"Yes," the other answered indifferently, "that's all I am,—Mellony Pember, Mrs. Pember's girl,—just that."
"Ain't that enough? Ain't that something to be,—all I plan for and work for? Ain't that enough for a girl to be?"
Mellony turned her eyes from emptiness, and fixed them upon her mother's face, dimly outlined in the vagueness.
"Is that all you've been," she asked, "just somebody's daughter?"
It was as if a heavy weight fell from her lips and settled upon her mother's heart. There was a silence. Mellony's eyes, though she could not see them, seemed to Mrs. Pember to demand an answer in an imperative fashion unlike their usual mildness.
"It's because I've been,—it's because I'd save you from what I have been that I—do as I do. You know that," she said.