The Shoulders of Atlas: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“Good-morning,” said Horace. There was something terrible about the face of patient defiance which the woman lifted to his.

“You will not—” she began.

Horace caught her thin hand and pressed it heartily. “Good God, Mrs. Ayres!” he stammered.

She nodded. “Yes, I understand. I can trust you,” she said. “I am very glad it happened with you.”

Horace was relieved to be out in the open air. He felt as if he had escaped from an atmosphere of some terrible emotional miasma. He reflected that he had heard of such cases as poor Lucy Ayres, but he had been rather incredulous. He walked along wondering whether it was a psychological or physical phenomenon. Pity began to get the better of his shame for himself and the girl. The mother's tragic face came before his eyes. “What that woman must have to put up with!” he thought.

When he had commenced the morning session of school he found himself covertly regarding the young girls. He wondered if such cases were common. If they were, he thought to himself that the man who threw the first stone was the first criminal of the world. He realized the helplessness of the young things before forces of nature of which they were brought up in so much ignorance, and his soul rebelled. He thought to himself that they should be armed from the beginning with wisdom.

He was relieved that at first he saw in none of the girl-faces before him anything which resembled in the slightest degree the expression which he had seen in Lucy Ayres's. These girls, most of them belonging to the village (there were a few from outside, for this was an endowed school, ranking rather higher than an ordinary institution), revealed in their faces one of three interpretations of character. Some were full of young mischief, chafing impatiently at the fetters of school routine. They were bubbling over with innocent animal life; they were longing to be afield at golf or tennis. They hated their books.

Some were frankly coquettish and self-conscious, but in a most healthy and normal fashion. These frequently adjusted stray locks of hair, felt of their belts at their backs to be sure that the fastenings were intact, then straightened themselves with charming little feminine motions. Their flowerlike faces frequently turned towards the teacher, and there was in them a perfect consciousness of the facts of sex and charm, but it was a most innocent, even childlike consciousness.

The last type belonged to those intent upon their books, soberly adjusted to the duties of life already, with little imagination or emotion. This last was in the minority.

“Thank God!” Horace thought, as his eyes met one and another of the girl-faces. “She is not, cannot be, a common type.” And then he felt something like a chill of horror as his eyes met those of a new pupil, a girl from Alford, who had only entered the school the day before. She was not well dressed. There was nothing coquettish about her, but in her eyes shone the awful, unreasoning hunger which he had seen before. Upon her shoulders, young as they were, was the same burden, the burden as old as creation, which she was required to bear by a hard destiny, perhaps of heredity. There was something horribly pathetic in the girl's shy, beseeching, foolish gaze at Horace. She was younger and shyer than Lucy and, although not so pretty, immeasurably more pathetic.