"What I tell you now, I tell you because you are the only one I can trust, and because, no matter what's happened, you are the one I want to understand. I have been married for five years!"
At this incredible announcement Dodo let her arms fall, half rising from her seat, open-mouthed.
"Married!"
"Five years!" Winona repeated, shrugging her shoulders. "Legally, that's all. Don't interrupt me; I want to get it over. I lived in a God-forsaken fishing village on the Maine coast—God-forsaken eight months of the year, waking up in the summer for a few city folks, second-class, who'd come down for three months, four months, to keep us going the rest of the year. Father was a decent sort, sea captain, fussing about a couple of cat-boats in the summer, lazy, but kind. My mother was a devil if ever there was one; but she worked hard, washing, cooking. She couldn't read or write. Why he married her—don't know! Because she got him with her good looks, probably, the looks she passed down to my sister and me! There were eight in the family, and we were the eldest—village belles. Morals weren't any too strict there; lord, why should they be? With everything gone to rot, no hope, no life, just existing, dragging through one month after another—sleet, ice and wind, and nothing ahead but to get old! All right, when you didn't know that something else existed over on the mainland! That was the trouble! They educated us—sent us over for a year's high school at New Bedford, to stay with an aunt.
"New Bedford! Lord, I thought it was a wonderland then; Boston and New York couldn't be any finer. Then she brought us back, to help in the living, to wait on the table when the boarders came, to end up by marrying—work for some man who'd sit around, to be fed and clothed, to have his house cleaned—children and all the rest."
She stopped a moment, frowning, and Dodo, overwhelmed at this picture of isolation and drudgery, that started before her eyes in the gesture and the voice of the girl, who seemed to have returned to it all, exclaimed:
"But why tell me?"
Without noticing the interruption, Winona continued, speaking as if to herself, seemingly unconscious of Dodo's presence:
"New Bedford and summer boarders! That was the whole trouble! I was eighteen, sister twenty, and the village belles! We used to get out of the windows, nights, and steal off for a dance, every chance we got. Lord! it was innocent enough, considering what the other girls were doing; but she—the mother—whenever she'd catch us, she used to go stark out of her mind, swear we were disgracing her, bringing shame on the family, insinuating—well, everything! That wasn't all! She tied us up and beat us with a strap—yes, just that!—until she couldn't beat or shriek at us any more. But that didn't stop us! It only made us hate everything—her, the home, the life! Once she beat my sister so that they had to call in a doctor. The next week she ran off—disappeared." Winona drew a long breath, and her arm swept toward the trackless city, lowering at their window-sides: "Never a word. God knows! The worst, I guess—here, perhaps—somewhere!
"She wanted me to go with her; I hadn't the nerve. Besides, there was a city fellow, clerk in a shoe store, who was taken with me, and I thought—I was sure—would marry me and get me out of it. But nothing ever came of that. After my sister went, she, the mother, never beat me again. Father had had some words with her, I guess. Only it was worse! She had bars put in my window, and she never let me out of her sight in summer. When she went to bed she locked me in herself. She swore she'd keep me, at least, an honest girl. Two years of that. God knows how many times I thought of ending it all!