She dragged herself back to the page in front of her and resumed her task with renewed vigour.
“Sarah Lubin was sixteen years old when she came to America. She came to get an education, but she had to go to a factory for bread,” she wrote laboriously, and then drew back to study her work. The sentences were wooden, dead, inanimate things. The words laughed up at her, mockingly.
Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Writers never started stories in this way. Her eyes wandered over to the bed, a hard, meagre cot. “I must remember to fix the leg, or it will tip to-night,” she mused.
“Here I am,” she cried despairingly, “thinking of my comforts again! And I thought I’d want nothing; I’d live only to write.” Her head sank to the rough edge of the potato-barrel. “Perhaps I was a fool to give up all for this writing.”
“Too many writers and too few cooks”: the dean’s words closed like a noose around her anguished soul.
When she looked up, the kind face of the college president smiled down at her.
“Then what is it in me that’s tearing and gnawing and won’t let me rest?” she pleaded. The calm faith of the eyes levelled steadily at her seemed to rebuke her despair. The sure faith of that lofty face lifted her out of herself. She was humble before such unwavering power. “Ach!” she prayed, “how can I be so sure like you? Help me!”
Sophie became a creature possessed. She lived for one idea, was driven by one resistless passion, to write. As the weeks and months passed and her savings began to dwindle, her cheeks grew paler and thinner, the shadows under her restless eyes were black hollows of fear.
There came a day more deadly than death, when she had to face failure. She took out the thinning wad from her stocking and counted out her remaining cash: one, two, three dollars, and some nickels and dimes. How long before the final surrender? If she kept up her rigorous ration of dry bread and oatmeal, two or three weeks more at most. And then?
An end to dreams. An end to ambition. Back to the cook-stove, back to the stifling smells of tzimmas, hash, and miltz.