"No. I didn't tell him—I couldn't tell him—anything.... Mr. Garvin, your people are fond of you—my people don't—love me." She had wrenched the thing out, despite the hurt.
Garvin breathed more freely. What a child she was! "What do you mean, dear? Have they been unkind to you—to-day?"
"They are kind to me, but they don't love me," Ann repeated, beginning to quiver. At one wrench and with tremendous effort, she had parted with reserve and the Penniman pride, and plunged on. "I don't know why they don't love me as they love each other. They have never loved me—even when I was little. My father went away an' left me because I reminded him that my being born killed my mother. An' now that he's back, I can see that he's never felt I was part of him. I understand better now—they're kind to me because they pity me. I don't want to be pitied—it's hateful to be pitied!... Your people love you, Mr. Garvin, so you can't understand—I reckon no one will understand." She had ended helplessly, not in tears, for she had wept herself into a decision that morning, and she was holding to that.
Garvin's hand had grown lax on hers and his face gloomy. She had swept away the sensuous emotion to which he had yielded while waiting for her. He had given himself up to a contemplation of possibilities as an escape from harassment. His pursuit of Ann had been just that, from the very beginning, an escape from unendurable conditions. Her, "They're kind to me because they pity me ... it's hateful to be pitied!" had brought back with a rush the thoughts that had darkened his face while he rode with Baird that morning. "Your people love you—so you can't understand." His people love him! How well he understood, indeed!
He had looked straight before him while she talked; now he looked down at her, stirred for almost the first time in his life by a sense of fellow-feeling. "Yes, I understand," he said steadily. "It takes the spirit out of you—gives you over to the very devil—to be dreaded and pitied—almost from your cradle up. I understand, Ann. It's so in some families—for one reason or another.... Some of us are born misfits; we're throwbacks—to something or some one that doesn't quite jibe with our environment. I reckon you're a bit too fine and spirited for your environment, Ann." He was looking at her brow and eyes, not the brow and eyes of a Penniman—not as he had known them.
Ann's sense of isolation caught at the note of sympathy, and she gave her decision into his keeping. "I can't bear things as they are, Mr. Garvin. I made up my mind this morning—I'm going away just as soon as I can."
She had startled him. "You, go away? Why, you're nothing but a child, Ann! Where could you go?"
Ann lifted her hands, held them out for him to see. He had noticed them before, not small hands, work-hardened, but shapely and flexible, with tapering fingers blunted a little at the tips, almost certain sign of manual labor imposed upon childhood. "Look at them!" Ann said tensely. "Would I work any harder with them for other people, than I have for my people? I'm goin'—there's the city for me to go to."
Garvin knew, far better than a stranger would, what such a decision meant to a Penniman—or a Westmore. It meant flinging away caste. They could toil unceasingly, bend their backs to the most menial labor, so long as they toiled upon their own freehold. But to become a servitor, labor with their hands for a wage!
"You can't do that, Ann," he said positively.