Mahala drew back.
She waited until she could speak smoothly, and then she said deliberately: “I don’t see how you can hold me responsible for what you’ve intended. If your father and mother were not stone blind with pride and conceit, they would know, and you would know, what this whole town thinks about the Morelands.”
Angered further by this, Junior retorted: “And what’s the whole town going to think when it finds out that the Spellmans will be in the poorhouse if my father chooses to foreclose the mortgages and demand payments on the notes that he holds on everything you’ve got on earth?”
In his anger and excitement, he had forgotten even to lower his voice. Inside the window, Mahlon Spellman, roused by his tones and the import of what he was saying, struggled to his feet and stood listening, one hand on a chair back steadying him, the other clutching his heart.
Under the nerve strain, big tears began slowly to slip down Mahala’s cheeks. That word “poorhouse” brought something menacing and gravely real to her vision. She knew where the county poorhouse was and what it was. She had gone there with her mother at Thanksgiving and Easter and Christmas times to try to carry a degree of cheer. Could it be possible that such a place threatened her father and her mother?
The tears softened Junior. He commenced to plead with her.
He said to her: “There’s no sense in a girl wasting time to go to college. You know how to sew and to keep a house beautifully. If you need a little help with the cooking, you can soon learn. You would only have to superintend. I could afford servants for you from the very start. Dad’s crazy about you. He’d do anything in the world I wanted for you. Forget this college business. I can’t eat calculus and radicals or drink syntax and prosody. You’re all right for me and for Ashwater, exactly the way you are!”
He started to seize her roughly, but divining his intentions, she swiftly evaded him and swung a heavy porch chair between them, and then, anger surging up to a degree overcoming fear, she spat at him her real thoughts.
“You coward! You always have been a coward! You always will be! You never picked on a boy in school unless you were twice his size. You never passed an examination without cheating. You even made the Principal fix up the grades that allowed you to graduate. You’ve never cared what happened to any other girl or boy so long as you were the leader and had what you wanted.”
At that Junior turned ugly. He stepped back and began to sneer.