"Sallie won't wash the dishes!" cried Mary.
"I'm sick," sobbed Sarah, "an' mom says Mary must wash 'em because she upset the stew this noon-time!"
In the merits of any case brought before him, the household Solomon was as little interested as if he had been the judge of a law-court. His years of overwork had limited his sense of a just division of toil among others, and his long oppression by task-masters had made himself a merciless task-master. Like the men that had driven him, he delighted most in driving those who were the hardest to drive. Sallie was too young to furnish appreciable resistance, but in the awakening Mary he now saw something that approached worthy opposition. He turned first to his wife.
"Did you tell 'er," he inquired, his stubby forefinger leveled at Mary—"did you tell 'er to wash 'un?"
Mrs. Denbigh bowed her sweating forehead in timid assent.
Then the father looked again at the offender.
"Wash 'un!" he ordered, and marched back to his parlor, his armchair, and his evening paper.
Mary knew her father too well not to know also the price of disobedience. Sullenly, but without hesitation, she retreated to the little kitchen and took up her uncongenial task.
Girlhood, then, must be denied much of its claim to recreation; the social machine was pitiless. Young life was a period of menial service from which the sole escape was marriage, whether to stranger or to friend. That a stranger should harm her was, to Mary—as it is to most girls of her age and environment—an idea unentertained: strangers were too few, and the world of moral fact too closely shut and guarded. Boys she had always been cautioned against in vague generalities; but she understood that they were prohibited because their company was a delectable luxury reserved for older and marriageable girls whose younger sisters were needed only to help in the household tasks.
Rebellion once more reddened her heart—rebellion, as she thought, against her own particular condition, but the old rebellion, actually, that burns, at one time or another, in every heart: the revolt of the individual, more or less conscious of its individuality, against the conditions that are combined to crush it. She poured the water from the heavy iron tea-kettle into the tin dishpan with a quick anger that was not eased when two or three of the scalding drops leaped back against her bared, round arms. She flung the home-boiled soap after the water, and she clattered the dishes as loudly as she dared. Through the window—her soul hot with the sense of the injustice done her—she could see the happy lights in Etta's house, and, her hands deep in the greasy fluid, it came to her suddenly that she had been a fool to neglect—to repudiate—to-day what might have been the golden chance to such an estate as her sister's.