“Maw,” she asked, “who is this?”
Her mother glanced at it indifferently. “Me,” she answered listlessly.
“You?” Selina Jo gasped.
“Yeah. Ruther, it usetah be. Tuck when I married yore paw.”
Selina Jo scanned the comely pictured face for some likeness to the slatternly creature who had given her birth. Wild resentment against something—she scarcely knew what—flamed in her heart. Suddenly she dashed the photograph to the floor and hurried from the cabin. As one reads the chronicle of her words, it must be remembered that her vocabulary was patterned after that of her father.
“Oh, Goddlemighty!” she burst out tempestuously, “I don’t want to be like her! I ain’t goin’ to, neither!”
Her acquaintances were limited to the score of families, most of them relatives, and all of them mental and moral replicas of her own, who lived near by. There was an almost abandoned church in the neighbourhood where, at rare intervals, some itinerant preacher held services. Upon one occasion, though, Shug took the family to preaching in what was known as the Briggs settlement which was ten miles nearer the railroad. It was here that Selina Jo had it impressed upon her young mind just how people of her stripe were looked upon by those cast in another mould.
Shortly after they had seated themselves in the church, Shug, uncouth and unshaven on the men’s side, and she and her mother on that reserved for her sex, Selina Jo heard one of the women whisper to her neighbour:
“Some o’ that Hudsill tribe!”
As the girl caught the slur in the words her face flushed darkly. She began to notice the unfavourable looks with which the men of the congregation were regarding her father. Even the children stared superciliously toward her mother and herself. Puzzled, vaguely hurt, at first she wondered why.