“America? The States?”
“The States, yes—Dakota.”
“Ropes shouldn’t drag me,” replied her mother with unusual firmness. “Oh, Lord! The food served all higgledy-piggledy, sour and sweet all running amuck; the trains a-peering in at your sixth floor window; the men hanging on to hooks in the crowd of the cars; the spittle all over the place; the rush and the crush and the pother never still. Go back there? No; you should kill me first!”
She was roused to unusual self-assertion and emphasis.
“Only for a visit,” said Katherine timidly.
“And what for—for a visit?” repeated Mrs. Massarene. “Now I’ve got back, I’ll stay where I am. Many and many a night I’ve lain awake in that hell; for hell ’tis, with the railways a-shrieking and rumbling past the windows, and the furnace chimneys a-bellowing fire and smoke, and the whistles a-screaming, and the pistons a-thumping; and I’ve thought of the old home and cried till I was blind, and said to myself, if ever a good God let me go back, I’d stay at home if I swept the streets for a living. I don’t fly in the face of Providence, Katherine.”
“But your home was in Ulster!”
“You don’t want to be throwing that in my teeth. I wasn’t brought up a fine English lady like you. But Europe’s Europe and the States is the States; and I won’t cross that grey, wild water again; no, not if you kill me!”
“Of course, my dear mother, you shall do as you wish.”
“Oh, you’re very soft-spoken, but you’re that obstinate! What do you want with the States? You’re so mighty pitiful of the poor—almost a socialist, as one may say. Well, I can tell you there’s harder lines there between rich and poor than there is in these old countries, and more hatred too. There aren’t nowhere,” continued Margaret Massarene, her pale face growing warm, “where the luxury’s more overdone, and the selfishness crueller, and the spending of money wickeder, than in the States. Nowhere on earth where the black man is loathed and the poor white is scorned as they are in that canting ‘free’ country!”