“Don’t you like children?”
“I loathe them,” she shot at him, out of the depths of a profound, long-accumulated exasperation; “the muddy little beasts.”
“Then I wouldn’t be vexed with them.”
“Do you like nailing boards in a rotten ice house?”
“Oh, I’m dog poor; I’ve got to take anything that comes along.”
“And, you fool, do you suppose I’d be here if I had anything at all? Do you suppose I’d stay in this damn lost hole if I could get anywhere else? Do you think I have no more possibilities than this?”
He mounted the ladder, and emerged upon the platform by her side, where he found a place, a minute, for a cigarette.
The woman’s face was bitter, her body tense.
“I’ll grow old and die in places like this,” she continued passionately; “I’ll grow old and die in pokey, little schools, and wear prim calico dresses, with a remade old white mull for commencements. I’ll never hear anything but twice two, and Persia is bounded on the north by,—with all the world beyond, Paris and London and Egypt, for the lucky. I want to live,” she cried to Gordon Makimmon, idly curious, to the still branches of the apple trees, the vista of village half-hid in dusty foliage. “I want to see things, things different, not these dumb, depressing mountains. I want to see life!”
Gordon had a swift memory of a city street grey in a reddening flood of dawn, of his own voice in a reddening flood of dawn, of his own voice mumbling out of an overwhelming, nauseous desperation that same determination, desire. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “you wouldn’t think so much of it when you’d seen it.”