We are coming more and more in America to use that word "class." The theory is that we came to this continent to escape class; but surely class has followed us, and restricted us, and counted us out into elect and damned, into those above and those below the salt. Rather let us say the truth, which is that class has followed us because we ourselves have followed after class.
But continually the great laws of survival go on after their own fashion. In the production of human beings there continually are at work the five laws of evolution, the five factors of heredity, environment and selection, blended with variation and isolation. These five factors build human characters, continue ever to do their amazing sums in life and success and survival. Sometimes they produce a Grace Rawn.
II
Perhaps it was the very factor of isolation that gave Grace Rawn her quality. She was a silent girl, somewhat reserved. Silence and reserve she got from her father's solemn self-absorption, her mother's quiet self-abnegation. She was softened in part by the gentle training of her mother, who talked most when her husband was not present.
Grace Rawn stood two inches taller than her mother, and had a certain severe distinction which covered many sins in shorthand. Her brows were dark and met above her eyes; and the latter, being somewhat myopic, usually were covered by glasses—which also not infrequently shield yet other multitudes of sins in stenography. Her chin was well out and forward. Her jaw was rounded, her teeth white and good, her carriage also good, if still a trifle stiff and awkward. In air she was slow and deliberate. Her eyes were gray like her mother's, her voice deep like her father's. She was what would be called old for her years, indeed a woman at sixteen. Most would have placed her age some years further on than the eighteen years which really were hers at this time.
Grace Rawn could not be said to have any circle of friends. Her soul was eclectic. In short, isolation, selection and variation, the three less known laws of growth, had done as much for her as the more vaunted factors of heredity and environment. Self-contained, adequate enough in appearance, although lacking that sort of magnetism which draws men to women, she would have passed with small notice in the average collection of her sex. For such as these, propinquity comes as a blessing in so far as natural selection is concerned.
III
In St. Louis, natural selection operated much as in the Silurian or the Elizabethan, or eke the Jeffersonian age, choice being made from that which offered at the family doorstep in either era. In Kelly Row good folk sat upon the doorstep of an eventide. The evening assemblage upon the Rawn front doorstep in Kelly Row grew larger as Grace grew older. Certain young men came. Why did they come? Why do we walk about and around a tree that hangs full in fruit not yet ripened, watching the bloom on this, the texture of that, the size or probable flavor of yonder example hanging as yet unfinished in the alchemy of the summer sun? At least the little company at times was larger on the Rawn front stoop of an evening. It all went on in the easy, careless, hopeful, unconventional fashion of families of the Rawn class. Let it be remembered that class really is class in this country. There seemed little hope for Grace, therefore, other than in a marriage after the stereotyped fashion of Kelly Row. Perhaps if good fortune attended, she might marry a man who, at middle age, might, like her father, be drawing a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month; a great man in the eyes of the world of Kelly Row, which lived on an average of half that per month.
IV
In this evening company, as Laura Rawn had mentioned, occasionally might have been found one Charles Halsey, himself now some twenty-four years of age at next spring's lambing-time; as his father, a Missouri farmer, would have said. Halsey had come to the city, a serious-minded youth, to seek his fortune, just as John Rawn had done at about the time Halsey himself was born. But whereas Rawn had concerned himself little in books, Halsey had, by such means as only himself could have told, managed a degree in engineering in what New England calls a freshwater college, the same not so good as salt, yet, in Halsey's belief better than none and cheaper than some. Once out of college and finding himself belated, he had thrust into the thick of the fray of the business world to the best of his ability, though to his surprise not setting the world into any conflagration. These four years now, as chance had had it, he had been engaged in the drafting department of the engineer's offices in the same railway which employed John Rawn. A thoughtful young chap enough, and one held rather student than good fellow by his fellow clerks, because for the most part he did not join them in their dissipations, their cheap joys, their narrow ways of thinking. Also a chap regarded as not wholly desirable because he read much, and because he had ideas.