A short-lived and tragic enough romance. It wasn't that the Dicks were rowdy, or of evil repute. They were nobodies. In a day when social lines were so elastic as to be nearly all-inclusive the Dicks were miles outside the pale. In the first place, they lived out "Hardscrabble" way. That definitely placed them. The name designated a mean, tumble-down district southwest of town, inhabited by poor whites. A welter of mud, curs, barefoot babies, slatternly women, shirt-sleeved men lounging slackly against open doorways, acrid pipe in mouth.
Young Jesse Dick, sprung from this soil, still was alien to it; a dreamer; a fawn among wallowing swine; an idler with nothing of the villain about him and the more dangerous because of that. Isaac Thrift and his prim wife certainly would sooner have seen their daughter Charlotte dead than involved with one of the Dick clan. But they were unaware of the very existence of the riffraff Dicks. The Thrifts lived in two-story-and-basement elegance on Wabash near Madison, and kept their own cow.
There was a fine natural forest between Clark and Pine Streets, north, on the lake shore. Along its grassy paths lay fallen and decayed trees. Here the two used to meet, for it came to that. Charlotte had an Indian pony which she rode daily. Sometimes they met on the prairie to the south of town. The picture of Charlotte in the sweeping skirt, the stiff little hat, the caressing plume, and the rose must have been taken at about this time. There was in her face a glow, a bloom, a radiance such as comes to a woman—with too heavy eyebrows—who is beloved for the first time.
It was, as it turned out, for the last time as well. Charlotte had the courage for clandestine meetings in spite of a girlhood hedged about with prim pickets of propriety: but when she thought of open revolt, of appearing with Jesse Dick before the priggish mother and the flinty father, she shrank and cowered and was afraid. To them she was little more than a fresh young vegetable without emotions, thoughts, or knowledge of a kind which they would have considered unmaidenly.
Charlotte was sitting in the dining room window-nook one day, sewing. It was a pleasant room in which to sit and sew. One could see passers-by on Madison Street as well as Wabash, and even, by screwing around a little, get glimpses of State Street with its great trees and its frame cottages. Mrs. Thrift, at the dining room table, was casting up her weekly accounts. She closed the little leather-bound book now and sat back with a sigh. There was a worried frown between her eyes. Mrs. Thrift always wore a worried frown between her eyes. She took wife-and-motherhood hard. She would have thought herself unwifely and unmotherly to take them otherwise. She wore her frown about the house as she did her cap—badge of housewifeliness.
"I declare," she said now, "with beef six cents the pound—and not a very choice cut, either—a body dreads the weekly accounts."
"M-m-m," murmured Charlotte remotely, from the miles and miles that separated them.
Mrs. Thrift regarded her for a moment, tapping her cheek thoughtfully with the quill in her hand. Her frown deepened. Charlotte was wearing a black sateen apron, very full. Her hair, drawn straight back from her face, was gathered at the back into a chenille net. A Garibaldi blouse completed the hideousness of her costume. There quivered about her an aura—a glow—a roseate something—that triumphed over apron, net, and blouse. Mrs. Thrift sensed this without understanding it. Her puzzlement took the form of nagging.
"It seems to me, Charlotte, that you might better be employed with your plain sewing than with fancywork such as that."
Charlotte's black sateen lap was gay with scraps of silk; cherry satin, purple velvet, green taffetas, scarlet, blue. She was making a patchwork silk quilt of an intricate pattern (of which work of art more later).