"I think I would have liked him."
"You're sorry you stopped?"
"Sometimes," replied she, hesitatingly.
She was beginning to be afraid that she would soon be sorry all the time. Every day the war within burst forth afresh. She reproached herself for her growing hatred of her life. Ought she not to be grateful that she had so much—that she was not one of a squalid quartette in a foul, vermin-infested back bedroom—infested instead of only occasionally visited—that she was not a streetwalker, diseased, prowling in all weathers, the prey of the coarse humors of contemptuous and usually drunken beasts; that she was not living where everyone about her would, by pity or out of spitefulness, tear open the wounds of that hideous brand which had been put upon her at birth? Above all, she ought to be thankful that she was not Jeb Ferguson's wife.
But her efforts to make herself resigned and contented, to kill her doubts as to the goodness of "goodness," were not successful. She had Tom Brashear's "ungrateful" nature—the nature that will not let a man or a woman stay in the class of hewers of wood and drawers of water but drives him or her out of it—and up or down.
"You're one of those that things happen to," the old cabinetmaker said to her on a September evening, as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. The tenements had discharged their swarms into the hot street, and there was that lively panorama of dirt and disease and depravity which is fascinating—to unaccustomed eyes. "Yes," said Tom, "things'll happen to you."
"What—for instance?" she asked.
"God only knows. You'll up and do something some day. You're settin' here just to grow wings. Some day—swish!—and off you'll soar. It's a pity you was born female. Still—there's a lot of females that gets up. Come to think of it, I guess sex don't matter. It's havin' the soul—and mighty few of either sex has it."
"Oh, I'm like everybody else," said the girl with an impatient sigh. "I dream, but—it doesn't come to anything."
"No, you ain't like everybody else," retorted he, with a positive shake of his finely shaped head, thatched superbly with white hair. "You ain't afraid, for instance. That's the principal sign of a great soul, I guess."