"No, I am not that," Ann declared, firmly. "I'm just like the general run of women, weak and wishy-washy, with dry powder in my make-up that anybody can touch a match to. There is no counting on what I'll do next. Right now I feel like being your stanch friend, but I really don't know but what, if your mammy hemmed me in a corner, I'd even throw up to her what you did that night. I say I don't know what notion might strike me. She can, with one word or look of hers, start perdition's fire in me. I don't know any more than a cat what made me go contrary to my plans that night. It wasn't in a thousand miles of what I wanted to do, and having Jane Hemingway come back here with a sound body and tongue of fire isn't what I saved money to pay for. If forgiveness is to be the white garment of the next life, mine will be as black as logwood dye."
"The pretty part of it all is that you don't know yourself as you really are," Virginia said, almost smiling in her enthusiasm. "Since I've seen the beautiful side of your character I've come almost to understand the eternal wisdom even in human ills. But for your hatred of my mother, your kindness to me would not be so wonderful. For a long time I had only my mother to love, but now, Mrs. Boyd, somehow, I have not had as great anxiety about her down there as I thought I would have. Really, my heart has been divided between you two. Mrs. Boyd, I love you. I can't help it—I love you."
Ann suddenly raised her sheet and folded it in her lap. Her face had softened; there was a wonderful spiritual radiance in her eyes.
"It's powerful good and sweet of you to—to talk that way to a poor, despised outcast like I am. I can't remember many good things being said about me, and when you say you feel that way towards me, why—well, it's sweet of you—that's all, it's sweet and kind of you."
"You have made me love you," Virginia said, simply. "I could not help myself."
Ann looked straight at the girl from her moist, beaming eyes.
"I'm a very odd woman, child, and I want to tell you what I regard as the oddest thing about me. You say you feel kind towards me, and, and—love me a little. Well, ever since that night in that young scamp's room, when I came on you, crouched down there in your misery and fear, looking so much like I must 'a' looked at one time away back when not a spark of hope flashed in my black sky—ever since I saw you that way, helpless as a fresh violet in the track of a grazing bull, I have felt a yearning to draw you up against this old storm-beaten breast of mine and rock you to sleep. That's odd, but that isn't the odd thing I was driving at, and it is this, Virginia—I don't care a snap of my finger about my own child. Think of that. If I was to hear of her death to-night it wouldn't be any more to me than the news of the death of any stranger."
"That is queer," said Virginia, thoughtfully.
"Well, it's only nature working, I reckon," Ann said. "I loved her as a baby—in a natural way, I suppose—but when she went off from me, and by her going helped—child though she was—to stamp the brand on me that has been like the mark of a convict on my brow ever since—when she went off, I say, I hardened my heart towards her, and day after day I kept it hard till now she couldn't soften it. Maybe if I was to see her in trouble like you were in, my heart would go out to her; but she's independent of me; the only thing I've ever heard of her is that she cries and shudders at the mention of my name. She shudders at it, and she'll go down to her grave shuddering at it. She'll teach her children not to mention me. No, I'll never love her, and that's why it seems odd for me to feel like I do about you. Heaven knows, it seems like a dream when I remember that you are Jane Hemingway's child and the chief pride of her hard life. As for my own girl, she's full grown now, and has her natural plans and aspirations, and is afraid my record will blight them. I don't even know how she looks, but I have in mind a tall, stiff-necked, bony girl inclined to awkwardness, selfish, grasping, and unusually proud. But I can love as well as hate, though I've done more hating in my life than loving. There was a time I thought the very seeds of love had dried up in me, but about that time I picked up Luke King. Even as a boy he seemed to look deep into the problems of life, and was sorry for me. Somehow me and him got to talking over my trouble as if he'd been a woman, and he always stood to me and pitied me and called me tender names. You see, nobody at his home understood him, and he had his troubles, too, so we naturally drifted together like a mother and son pulled towards one another by the oddest freak of circumstances that ever came in two lives. We used to sit here in this room and talk of the deepest questions that ever puzzled the human brain. Our reason told us the infinite plan of the universe must be good, but we couldn't make it tally with the heavy end of it we had to tote. He was rebellious against circumstances and his lazy old step-father's conduct towards him, and he finally kicked over the traces and went West. Well, he had his eyes open out there, and came back with the blaze of spiritual glory in his manly face. He started in to practise what he was preaching, too. He yanked out of his pocket the last dollar of his savings and forked it over to the last people on earth to deserve it. That made me so mad I couldn't speak to him for a while, but now I'm forced to admit that the sacrifice hasn't harmed him in the least. He's plunging ahead down there in the most wonderful way, and content—well, content but just for one thing. I reckon you know what that is?"
Ann paused. Virginia was looking out through the open doorway, a flush creeping over her sensitive face. She started to speak, but the words hung in her throat, and she only coughed.