"There I had a nice bit of chopped meat fried and ready for you," she said. "You ought to let me know when you’re not coming in. It’s a trouble to me and a waste of money to buy things and you not to touch them."
"Forget it!" said her child. "I’m never in any hurry to get home, I can tell you. To this hole! Why should I?"
"To see me!" cried her mother in desperation.
"Been seeing you every day for nineteen years. No, mommer, you can’t keep me hanging round you any more. I got to be free."
"That don’t mean you’re not to be kind and loving to——”
"Well, I’m not kind and loving. Gawd didn’t make me that way."
Her mother grew more and more certain that Angelica had met with some disaster in her past situation. She thought over it at night when she lay in bed, in the day while she worked—thought of it with anguish and terror. Her peasant soul forgot its acquired American sophistication, and craved that age-old solace nowhere to be found in her present mode of life—a priest, a pastor, some one in authority to reassure her.
She hadn’t even neighbours to gossip with, as people had in the "old country." There was no one who had seen her child grow up, who knew all about her, and could and would discuss her with kindly penetration. A stranger in a strange land, but—how wretchedly!—a stranger to whom no country was home. Certainly America was not her heart’s land; certainly Scotland, the home of her parents, would have seemed wholly alien; while her husband’s birthplace, to her, was little more than a fantastic dream-land.
Unto the third generation does this strangeness persist. Angelica herself had that peculiar lack of ease, that exotic quality; she was an outsider. Her factory friends, too—they were of every race, and they had all become alike. Bohemian, Irish, Russian, Italian—they had all the same air; but it was a foreign air. Their adopted country had undeniably changed them into something different, but it had not made them American. It had made them only strangers.