Others gazed with simple, sad wistfulness upon the slender figure, pale, sweet face, and dark eyes of the young girl, feeling that to have talk with such a fairy-like creature was a happiness too great to ever be their lot. And when she had passed they went back to work with a sigh and feeling of loss.
As for Lily, she felt a pang of pity for these people. She looked at this peculiar form of poverty and hardship much as the fragile, tender girl of the city looks upon the men laying a gas-main in the streets. She felt (sympathetically) the heat and grime, and though but the faintest idea of what it meant to wear such clothing came to her, she shuddered. Her eyes had been opened to these things by Radbourn, who was a well-known radical,—a law student in Rock River.
“Poor fellows!” sighed Lily, almost unconsciously. “I hate to see them working there in the dirt and hot sun. It seems a hopeless sort of life, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, but this is the most beautiful part of the year,” said Radbourn. “Think of them in the mud, in the sleet; think of them husking corn in the snow, a bitter wind blowing; think of them a month later in the harvest; think of them imprisoned here in winter!”
“Yes, it’s dreadful! But I never felt it so keenly before. You have opened my eyes to it.”
“Writers and orators have lied so long about ‘the idyllic’ in farm life, and said so much about the ‘independent American farmer’ that he himself has remained blind to the fact that he’s one of the hardest-working and poorest-paid men in America. See the houses they live in,—hovels.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Lily; a look of deeper pain swept over her face. “And the fate of the poor women, oh, the fate of the women!”
“Yes, it’s a matter of statistics,” went on Radbourn, pitilessly, “that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there’s Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a future, if they knew it, and we must tell them.”
“I know Mrs. Burns; she sends several children to my school. Poor, pathetic little things, half-clad and wistful-eyed. They make my heart ache; they are so hungry for love, and so quick to learn.”
As they passed the Burns farm, they looked for the wife but she was not to be seen. The children had evidently gone up to the little white schoolhouse at the head of the lane. Radbourn let the reins fall slack as he talked on. He did not look at the girl, his eyebrows were drawn into a look of gloomy pain.