Suddenly she flashed to her feet with a beautiful litheness and stood facing him, her hands clenched into little fists, her breast heaving.
“I will tell you. I’ve got to tell somebody. It’s because I hate this”—she swept her hand over Diversity. “It’s because it’s horrible, unbearable. It’s because I’m chained down here like a prisoner in a dungeon. That’s why I go to watch the train—it is going away, going out there where people live. That’s why I come up here. It’s my little window to look out of. I can see beyond Diversity. Sometimes a vessel passes. I imagine I am on it, going away—to Chicago—to New York—to San Francisco. Here I can turn my back on Diversity and see where its dead hand cannot reach. I hate the town, I hate the people, but most of all I hate the children. Oh, look shocked! But sit in a room with thirty of them ten months a year; watch their smugness; try to cram spelling and geography and arithmetic into them; try to make an impression on their dullness. They’re a nightmare! That’s why I come here—to look away from them, beyond them, to see a spot that’s not tainted with them. I was born here.” She said the last as though it were the summing up of all evil.
“My dear young lady,” said Jim, in a tone that was ludicrously paternal, “you’re working yourself up to—hysterics or something.”
She leaned against the old hickory-tree, panting, clutching the folds of her skirt with convulsive fingers.
“I want to go—go—go! I want to see things—to be a part of them. I’m smothered. This is living in a graveyard where there’s a perpetual fog. Other people live. Other people have things happen to them, and I—I don’t even dare read about them in books. I couldn’t stand it.”
Jim wanted to run, yet he wanted to stay. Here was a manifestation far outside the purview of his experience. It was a little adventure into a human soul, and Jim’s contact with the human soul had been superficial.
“If you want to go, why—why in thunder don’t you go?” he said, boyishly.
She flashed a gleam of scorn upon him. “I’m a girl—a girl—the most helpless, most defenseless, most easily damaged thing under the sun. Why don’t I go?” Her tone snapped with scorn. “What would I do? Who would take me in? What would become of me? Here I’m safe. I may die of it, but I’m safe. It might be less hideously barren if I weren’t. I’m alone. I’ve been alone since I was fifteen. Some day it’ll be too much for me and I’ll go. But I won’t be fooled into it. I’ll go with my eyes open, knowing why I go. If I go nobody’ll be to blame—except Diversity—for I’ll have made my choice deliberately. Don’t look shocked. I suppose there have been millions of others before me who had the same choice to make. I’m not unique. You men have made the world, and when you get a glimpse of it once in a while you’re shocked.”
“Miss”—Jim paused and bit his finger in bewilderment—“I don’t just know what you’re accusing us men of, nor the world in general. But I’ve lived a bit more than you. I’ve lived enough to know this—that there’s more good than evil. There are more folks who are trying to do right than who deliberately do wrong. I know that even in the bad ones there’s more good than bad. I believe if you were to take all the law and machinery of the law, all the police, all the social protection out of the world to-day, that to-morrow the force for right which is in the world would assert itself. There is so much more good than bad in the world that the bad would be held down by the mere weight of the good. You hear about the evil, because the evil thing is news, something to talk about, something to make readers for the newspapers. And it’s news because it’s out of the normal. So there seems to be a lot more bad than there is. Goodness is normal—so normal that nobody notices it.”
“Men always defend themselves plausibly.”