IX
Grace addressed herself sincerely to the business of bringing all the cheer possible to the home circle. She overcame her annoyance at being obliged to recount the details of her work, realizing that her mother spent her days at home and save for the small affairs of her club had little touch with the world beyond her dooryard. Ethel’s days in the insurance office were much alike and she lacked Grace’s gift for making a good story out of a trifling incident. Even Mr. Durland enjoyed Grace’s account of the whims and foibles of the women she encountered at Shipley’s. Grace reasoned that so long as she lived at home it would be a mistake not to make the best of things; but even in her fits of repentance she had not regretted her assertion of the right to go and come unquestioned.
In the week following she left the house on two evenings saying merely that she was going out. On one of these occasions she returned a book to the public library; on another she walked aimlessly for an hour. These unexplained absences were to determine whether her new won liberty was really firmly established. Nothing was said either by her mother or Ethel, though it was clear that they were mystified by her early return, though not to the point of asking where she had been. On a third evening she announced at the table that she had earned a good bonus that day and would celebrate by taking them all to the vaudeville. Mrs. Durland and Ethel gave plausible excuses for declining, but not without expressing their appreciation of the invitation in kind terms, and Grace and her father set off alone.
In her cogitations Grace was convinced that nothing short of a miracle could ever improve materially the family fortunes. They had the house free of encumbrance, but it needed re-roofing, and the furnishings were old and dingy. Mrs. Durland had worked out a budget by which to manage the family finances, and it was clear enough to Grace that what she and Ethel earned would just about take care of the necessary running expenses. Mrs. Durland had received for many years an income of five hundred dollars a year from her father’s estate, and this Grace learned had always been spent on the family. The last payment had been put away, Mrs. Durland explained to her daughters, to help establish Roy after he completed his law course. It was impressed upon Grace constantly that all the hopes of bettering the family conditions centered in Roy. Ethel shared, though in less degree, her mother’s confidence in the son of the house. Grace kept silent when Roy’s prospects were discussed, feeling that it would serve no purpose to express her feeling that Roy had no special talent for the law, and even if he had the Durlands were without family or business connections that could possibly assist him in establishing himself.
X
Grace’s meeting with Bob Cummings served to sharpen her sense of social differentiations. Her mother had always encouraged the idea that the Durlands were a family of dignity, entitled to the highest consideration; but stranded as they were in a neighborhood that had no lines of communication with polite society, Mrs. Durland now rarely received an invitation even to the houses of her old friends. Grace’s excursions in social science had made her aware of the existence of such a thing as class consciousness; but she had never questioned that she belonged to the favored element. The thought assailed her now that as a wage-earning girl she had a fixed social status from which there was little likelihood she would ever escape. The daughters of prominent families she waited on at Shipley’s were no better looking, no more intelligent and had no better social instincts than she possessed; but she was as completely shut off from any contact with them as though she were the child of a Congo chieftain. With all her romanticism she failed to picture the son of one of the first families making her acquaintance and introducing her to his family as the girl he meant to marry. Several young men with whom she became acquainted in Shipley’s had asked her to go to dances, or for Sunday drives. Irene sniffed when Grace reported these overtures.
“Oh, they’re nice fellows; but what have they got to offer? They’re never going to get anywhere. You can’t afford to waste your time on them.”
However, Grace accepted one of these invitations. The young man took her to a public dance hall where the music was good, but the patrons struck her as altogether uninspiring; and she resented being inspected by a police matron. She danced with her escort all evening, and then they went to a cafeteria for sandwiches and soda water.
Irene had warned Grace that such young fellows were likely to prove fresh; that they always expected to kiss a girl good-night, and might even be insulting; but this particular young man was almost pathetically deferential. Grace was ashamed of herself for not inviting him to call, but she shrank from encouraging his further attentions; he might very easily become a nuisance.
Again, she went to Rosemary Terrace, a dance and supper place on the edge of town, in company with a young man who carried a bottle on his hip to which he referred with proud complacency, as though it were the symbol of his freedom as an American citizen. The large dance hall was crowded; the patrons were clearly the worse for their indulgence in the liquor carried by their escorts; the dancing of many of the visitors was vulgar; the place was hot and noisy and the air heavy with tobacco smoke. Grace’s young man kept assuring her that the Rosemary was the sportiest place in town; you didn’t see any dead ones there. His desire to be thought a sport would have been amusing if he hadn’t so strenuously insisted upon explaining that he was truly of the great company of the elect to whom the laws of God and man were as nothing. When Grace asked to be taken home he hinted that there were other places presumably even less reputable, to which they might go. But he did not press the matter, when, reaching the Durland gate, he tried to kiss her and she, to mark the termination of their acquaintance, slapped him.