Annie Kilburn : a Novel

by William Dean Howells

“George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn.”

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the cream. “I've been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects; but I've been away a great deal this season, and—and—We're all very happy to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I've often heard my wife speak of your old days together at Hatboro'.”

They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand upon it.

Lyra interrupted them. “Well, I think now that Annie is here, we'd better not let her get away without showing her the Works.”

“Oh—oh—decidedly! I'll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!” He bustled about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office door they encountered Jack Wilmington.

“I'll show them through,” he said to his uncle; and the old man assented with, “Well, perhaps you'd better, Jack,” and went back to his room.

The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to time, at Lyra's bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different numbers. “Here's where I used to work,” said Lyra, “and here's where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place is full of romantic associations. The stockings are all one size, Annie; but people like to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number do you wear? Or don't you wear the Wilmington machine-knit? I don't. Well, they're not dreams exactly, Annie, when all's said and done for them.”

When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her, saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that Jack was going to Boston.

They had a long evening together, after Mr. Wilmington took himself off after tea to his study, as he called it, and remained shut in there. Annie was uneasily aware of him from time to time, but Lyra had apparently no more disturbance from his absence than from his presence, which she had managed with a frank acceptance of everything it suggested. She talked freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was. She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because she never went anywhere.

Annie said she thought she would at least like to go to the seaside somewhere during the summer, but “No,” Lyra said; “it would be too much trouble, and you know, Annie, I always did hate trouble. I don't want the care of a cottage, and I don't want to be poked into a hotel, so I stay in Hatboro'.” She said that she had always been a village girl, and did not miss the interests of a larger life, as she caught glimpses of them in South Hatboro', or want the bother of them. She said she studied music a little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.