“It is quite impossible,” she answered hoarsely; “quite, quite! Never speak to me of such a thing”—Her face was stinging, her voice was broken, as a woman’s might be to whom some insulting thing had been said. “You will go, if you please,” she ended, her head high, and with a certain gesture that confounded him.
“But look a-here,” he insisted, following her as she moved away from him; “Annie, look a-here; that fellow ain’t a-goin’ to marry anybody but a rich lady; his kind ain’t goin’ to marry you.”
“Well, I shan’t marry my kind, then! You can just understand that,” she cried, with a sudden almost coarse fury. “There’s no use for you to think of such a thing. Don’t ever dare to spake to me that way again!”
This is as far as Annie Graham has lived her story. She and Dave practically summed the matter up between them: “His kind will not marry you;” and “I will not marry my kind.”
The story is unfinished; one waits to see what will happen.
There are three things open to Annie: She may live out her life in South Bend; teaching, perhaps, in the public school, gradually refining the terrible little house, rejoicing Johnny’s heart, and never interfering, merely for her own æsthetic necessities, with the unlovely habits of Johnny’s fifty years of unlovely living; she may learn to accept his intimates as her acquaintances, his Mrs. Pugsleys and Dave Duggans as household friends, starving all the while for the companionship of her equals. Or—
She may shake off these intolerable surroundings which make her shrink as instinctively as an open eye shrinks from dust; she may turn her back on South Bend, and the tenement house, and the painted snow-shovel, and her father’s shirt-sleeves, and her father’s tender heart, and go out into the world to live her own strong, refined, intellectual life, perhaps as a teacher in her old college; marrying, after a while, some one who has never seen her father, and coming into the soul-destroying possession of that skeleton in the American closet—the vulgarity of the preceding generation. Or—
She may, because of sheer misery in the struggle between the new and the old, and for the dreadful suffocating comfort of it, fall back into the pit whence she was digged and try to forget the upper air.
What is the child’s duty? To live her own life, or to live some one else’s life? Is she to accept success or failure, fulfillment or renunciation?