"I wish I had been with you at both places," he said courteously, with a little touch of formality that the Irish girl ridiculed and the southern girl liked. "It must have been like going to the theater and seeing both a comedy and a tragedy, only in that case they usually put the comedy last."
"That may be what they do at the theater but it isn't what they do in life."
Kathleen was ready to talk. She sat in her chair and told the story of southern peonage and wrong.
Hertha, who had failed to listen at Cooper Union, was moved in spite of herself at the tragic tale as it came from Kathleen's lips. It was the same in all essentials, but vivified by a rare imagination and a compelling sympathy. The Irishwoman became herself the thin, yellow, starved mother dragging her steps from her unlovely home into the hot, relentless fields.
"Have you ever seen anything like that?" William Applebaum asked of Hertha when the story came to an end.
Hertha hesitated as she answered. "No, I don't think I have. I lived much of the time in the city. I haven't known about such things." She thought of Ellen as she spoke, and was sure, had she been there, she could have talked intelligently about peonage and poverty among white and black. She remembered that Ellen used to say the Negro never fell as low as the lowest white. "Those are the folks," she added, "that we call poor white trash."
Her friend flared up at her. "Yes, and why are they trash? Because you treat them worse than slaves! You hold them in debt, steal from them with every piece of bacon or cup of meal they buy from your store, work their children when they should be at school or playing out under the blue skies; and then you live in idleness and sneer at the trash that done the work of the world for you."
"Miss Hertha doesn't sneer, and neither do I, Kitty, but I think you're talking of an exceptional case. At any rate, as I have seen things in the North and West, I've found that it was the fault of the man if he didn't live decently in the world, and keep his woman that way, too. Why didn't this woman's husband pay off his debt and go to another farm?"
"For the same reason likely that his children won't. Because he was starved and worked until all the life was squeezed out of him."
"Well, it's not that way in the North."