There was deep silence between Applegate and his daughter for a little while. Why should either speak when there was really nothing to say?
“Supper is on the table, father,” observed Dora, at last. “There is no use in letting it get any colder,” and still in silence they went to their meal.
Julie MacDonald, born Dessaix, was the daughter of a French market-gardener and of a Spanish woman, the danseuse of a travelling troupe, who, when the company was left stranded in an Indiana town, married this thrifty admirer. The latter part of Julie’s childhood was passed in a convent school, whence she emerged at fifteen a rabid little Protestant with manners which the Sisters had subdued slightly but had not been able to make gentle. She learned the milliner’s trade, which she practised until, at twenty-two, she married Frazer MacDonald, a gigantic, red-haired Scotch surveyor.
A few years after their marriage MacDonald went West, intending to establish himself and then send for Julie, whom he left meanwhile with her sister, the wife of a well-to-do mechanic living in Pullman. His train was wrecked somewhere in Arizona and the ruins took fire. MacDonald was reported among those victims whose bodies were too badly burned for complete identification, and though Julie refused to believe it at first, when the long days brought no tidings she knew in her heart that it was true.
She established herself at her old trade in one of the county towns of the Indiana prairie country, where she worked and prospered for three years before John Applegate asked her to marry him.
At the convent they had tried to teach her to worship God, but abstractions were not in Julie’s line. Respectability was more tangible than righteousness, and deference to the opinion of the world an idea she could grasp. The worship of appearances came to be Julie’s religion. Nothing could be more respectable than John Applegate, who was a hardware dealer and one of Belleplaine’s leading merchants, and she accepted him with an almost religious enthusiasm.
The hardware business in a rich farming country is a good one. And then, in her own very unreasonable way, Julie was fond of Applegate.
“A little mouse of a man, yes,” she said to herself, “but such a good little mouse! I’ll have my way with things. When MacDonald was alive he had his way. Now—we’ll see.”
As for Applegate, he was just an average, unheroic, common-place man, such stuff as the mass of people are made of. Having decided to remarry for the sake of his children, he committed the not-uncommon inconsistency of choosing a woman who could never be acceptable to them and who suited himself entirely only in certain rare and unreckoning moods which were as remote from the whole trend of his existence as scarlet is from slate-color. But he found this untamed daughter of the people distinctly fascinating, and, with the easy optimism of one whose eyes are blinded by beauty, assured himself that it would come out all right.
His little daughter kissed him dutifully and promised to try to be a good girl when he told her he was going to bring a new mamma home, a pretty, jolly mamma, who would be almost a play-mate for her and Teddy, but secretly she felt a prescience that this was not the kind of mamma she wanted.