“From Hess’s farm, back up the road a piece,” she replied with her usual unemotional literalness. “I been there a week, but 14I didn’t like it, so I came away. The welfare workers got me that place when my time was up.”
Her time! Good Heavens, could this little country girl with her artless manner and candid eyes be an ex-convict? Surely she was too young, too simple. Yet the gates of hideous reformatories had clanged shut behind younger and more innocent-appearing delinquents than she.
His eyes wandered over her thin, childish figure as she sat there beside him, still intent upon the movements of the glittering dragonfly, and he shuddered. Those horrible, shapeless shoes might very well have been prison-made, and the striped dress was exactly like those he had seen in some pictures of female convicts. Her freckles, too, might have been the result of only a few days’ exposure to the sun, and he had already observed the whiteness of the skin beneath; that whiteness which resembled the prison pallor.
Could it be that her very gawkiness and frank simplicity were the result not of bucolic nature, but of dissimulation? Every instinct 15within the man cried out against the thought, but a devil of doubt and uncertainty drove him on.
“I thought that didn’t look like the dress of a farmer’s daughter!” He essayed to laugh, but it seemed to him that there was a grating falsetto in his tones. “You haven’t worked in the garden much, either, have you?”
“Garden!” Lou sniffed. “They promised the welfare workers that they’d give me outdoor chores to build me up, but when I got there I found I had to cook for eighteen farm-hands, as well as the family, an’ wait on them, an’ clean up an’ all. Said they’d pay me twelve dollars a month, an’ I could take the first month’s money out by the week in clothes, an’ for the first week all they gave me was this sunbonnet an’ apron. I left them the other dress an’ things I had, an’ I figgered the rest of the money they owed me would just about pay for this ham an’ bread an’ the knife an’ soap. The comb was mine.”
She added the last in a tone of proud possession, and James Botts asked very soberly:
“The welfare workers found this position 16for you, Lou Lacey? But where did they find you?”
“Why, at the institootion,” she responded, as though surprised that he had not already guessed. “I ain’t ever been anywhere else; I’ve always been a orphin.”