“That’s a striking-looking girl,” said Stevens, when the door closed. “She’ll be beautiful, if I’m not mistaken, when she’s older.”
“Yes, and the poor child has brains, moreover, which makes things ten times worse,—complicates the case.”
“Worse?” he repeated.
“She’s one of the curious developments for which this very remarkable end of the century is responsible. Would you have conceived it possible that that girl should be the daughter of a publican, for instance? A man who does all the roaring trade there is to do, in a god-forsaken place like Rilchester. But she is. Moreover, she’s a lady in tastes and instincts, down to the tips of her fingers. She’s an individualist by nature,—not the spurious, second-hand article manufactured out of badly digested Ibsen. She’s refreshingly ignorant of books at present; but she has thought, at her age.”
“And she walks like a princess already, and has imperial eyes,” Stevens added, smiling. “Curious.”
“Oh, she represents a large class,” the Professor returned, “though she happens to be a striking example.
“Poor child! I’m sorry for her. Did it ever occur to you, Stevens, what a girl like that must suffer? Our class barriers are but imperfectly broken down after all. She stands between two hostile classes,—by education and by nature she belongs to one, by birth and social position to the other. She has strong sympathies with both, but belongs wholly to neither. Her parents, poor souls, have probably denied themselves and striven strenuously to give her a ‘splendid education,’ thinking that in some mysterious fashion it will be good for her. When she returns to them, there is a great gulf fixed. Her tastes, her sympathies, her ideals, are not theirs, never can be theirs. They are hurt, she is hurt. It is inevitable. It is that saddest, most hopeless thing in life, ‘nobody’s fault.’ The girl is made to feel a traitor, disloyal, supercilious, at every turn, because things in the home life jar,—are distasteful to her. She hates herself, yet chafes at the hindrances in her path. The parents look on, uncomprehending, irritated and irritating,—disappointed, of course. And it is all inevitable, irrevocable, part of the movement.”
“This girl’s life is a case in point, you think?”
“Yes. She has revealed a good deal of it to me this evening. Oh! unconsciously. She’s as proud as Lucifer, of course. But I read between the lines, and Helen has talked to me about her sometimes. They were at school together.”
“You think it would have been a happier thing for her if she’d gone to some academy at Rilchester for a few years, with the other tradespeople’s children, and subsequently been given in marriage to a first-class grocer, who kept his provision-cart?”