And when college was done with and High Town was prepared to welcome Patsy into its innermost, idlest set, she had taken its breath away and distressed her father and mother by asking for and getting a position in the high school.
Her reasons for this surprising action were many. She could not and would not ask more from her parents. They had been generous, too generous, and she’d taken freely. It wasn’t fair, unless she went back to the farm and she wouldn’t do that. She could be near them if not with them, and still be where she could conquer High Town.
But Patsy soon learned—indeed she was pretty sure of it before she put her ambition to test—that the thing she had set out to win so long ago wasn’t the thing she wanted. She found herself free to come and go wherever she would in Sabinsport, but it was no longer an interest. College had done something to Patsy—set her on a chase after what she called the “real.” She didn’t know what it was, but she did know it was something to be worked for—which is perhaps more than most of the seekers of reality ever discover.
She was going to achieve the “real” and she was never going to be a snob. She wasn’t ever going to make anybody feel as those people in Sabinsport, with their suburban, metropolitan airs, had made her feel. She was going to treat everybody fair, for, as she sagely told herself, “You can never tell what anybody may do—look at me!” Which of course proves that Patsy was not free from calculation. Indeed, she steered her course solely by calculation, but it was calculation without malice, incapable of a meanness, a lie or a real unkindness.
“She’s out after what she wants,” a brother of one of her college friends had said once, “but you can be darn sure she’ll never double cross you in getting it: she’s white all through.” She was, but she was also hard; a kind, clean, just sort of hardness—of which she was entirely unconscious.
Patsy’s two years in the high school had won her the town solidly. And when in June, 1914, she went abroad everybody had been interested. It was her first trip and she had prepared for it thoroughly, drawing particularly on Dick’s stores of experience.
Ralph, who was feeling very wroth at her that spring because of her indifference to his reform plans, sniffed at this. “I don’t see why you give Patsy so much time over this trip of hers. It will only make her more unendurable, more cocksure, more blind to things about her. I like a woman that sees.”
“Sees what?” asked Dick.
“The condition of those about her—the future. Patsy McCullon doesn’t know there is a suffering woman or child in Sabinsport. She has never crossed the threshold of a factory or entered a mine.”
“She’s no exception,” said Dick. “There are not a half dozen of the women in Sabinsport, even those whose entire income comes from factory and mine, that know anything of the life of the men and women who do the work. You can’t blame Patsy for what is true of nearly all American well-to-do women. Of course it is shocking. But Patsy at least has the excuse that she gets no dividends from these institutions and so has no direct responsibility.”