"In May at the close of the social season—butterfly."
He had begun with a hunger in his heart to reach depths in hers, and he ended with laughter, with a feeling of being defrauded.
They stopped at Simpson's for a cool drink of cider and were on again, passing through wintry forests, with green Christmas trees against the creamy stretches where rabbit paths ran into dark entanglements. All at once they were in the open again, sweeping through a sudden factory village, Jenkinstown, stagnant with the exhaustion of the Sunday's rest.
"There, aren't you glad you didn't begin there?" she said gaily, with a nick of the whip toward the grim gray line of barracks that crowded against the street.
"You never would have married me then," he said.
"Oh, ask me anything but to be poor!" she said, shuddering.
"She might at least have lied," he thought grimly. He gazed with curiosity at this glimpse of factory life, at the dulled faces of women, wrapped in gay shawls, staring at them; at the sluggish loiterers on the corners, and the uncleanly hordes of children, who cried impertinently after them, recalling his father's words:—"a great mixed horde to be turned into intelligent, useful American citizens!" Squalid and hopelessly commonplace it seemed to him, cruelly devoid of pleasure or joy in the living. But such as these had placed him where he was, with an opportunity to turn in a year what in the lifetime of generations they could never approach.
The spectacle affected Doris like a disagreeable smell.
"I hate to think such people exist," she said, frowning.
"But they do exist," he said slowly.