Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

“ Nellie is far more dangerous than smallpox. Don’t you see—surely you must see! that it would have been better for the community if she had died last summer?”
“Better for the community,” Sara said passionately; “but what about Nellie? Would it have been better for Nellie?”
“It could hardly be worse, could it?” he answered dryly; “but if it were worse, better one lost soul than two or three.”
“God doesn’t lose souls so easily,” she cried; but he pressed the logic of her hope home.
“Then why not have trusted Him, and let her die? Death isn’t the worst thing in the world! ”

“ ANNIE GRAHAM, the young woman with whom this story concerns itself, lived in a Western manufacturing town. Her home was, both inside and outside, like hundreds and thousands of other American homes, a cheap frame house, in a cheap, respectable suburb; a house without any other beauty or refinement than cleanliness and a certain amount of rather coarse comfort. Her father was a workingman, as his father had been before him. He was a gasfitter, and went to his work every morning with a greasy leather bundle under his arm, and a cheerful heart in his breast. ”

“ Mr. Blair went into the drawing-room, breathing hard with the restraint he had put upon himself, for his coldly insolent words had been no outlet to his anger. “Don’t talk about it,” he said violently. “I won’t hear another word on the subject. Nell, I thought that little Hudson was not entirely a jackass, though he is a parson; he had the impertinence to say that ‘Brother West’ agreed with him. I don’t believe it! But if it’s true, why, then, West is a meddling idiot, like all the rest of these damned self-seeking philanthropists.” ”

“ She may shake off these intolerable surroundings which make her shrink as instinctively as an open eye shrinks from [189] dust; she may turn her back on South Bend, and the tenement house, and the painted snow-shovel, and her father’s shirt-sleeves, and her father’s tender heart, and go out into the world to live her own strong, refined, intellectual life, perhaps as a teacher in her old college; marrying, after a while, some one who has never seen her father, and coming into the soul-destroying possession of that skeleton in the American closet—the vulgarity of the preceding generation. ”

“ The saving of Nellie Sherman became an intense and passionate purpose in Sara Wharton’s life. Day by day, hour by hour, she watched and fought and prayed. She invented (according to the most approved charity methods) work for the vain and shiftless child; she had her taught to sew; she was careful to provide plenty of bright and wholesome amusement for her; by and by Nellie felt yearnings to be a bookkeeper, and Sara Wharton sent her to a commercial school. ”

“ It had been a cold, bright November day; she went past one of the silent furnaces along the black cinder path to the river-bank, where the flat cones of slag were dumped; some of them were still slightly warm.
It was quiet enough here to think: After all, Robert’s money did so much good; there was the great fountain in the square, and the hospital, and the free night school. And think of what he was doing for Essie and Silas! Oh, it surely wasn’t her business to ask why he cut the men’s wages down! ”

“ Sara seemed to this poor, mean soul, a powerful enemy, one who interfered with every joy, and, not content with that, who “talked;” and Nellie hated talk. Like most of her class, except when in a rage, she had little to say beyond ex [238] clamations, and Miss Wharton’s impetuous flow of words, her entreaties, and rebukes, and suggestions, had only bewildered and irritated the girl; for Sara, like most of her class, had never taken Nellie’s mental deficiencies into account; she treated her always like a rational being. Like a “Soul,” Sara herself would have said. ”

“ Gentlemen, you have felt it your duty to remonstrate with me upon my way of making money; so long as you are content to spend that money, I cannot believe that your remonstrances are based upon anything else than the inconvenience to yourselves of certain exigencies which I deeply regret, but which result from methods which commend themselves to me, and which, I observe, you apply in your own concerns: you all pay as little as you can for what you want; I pay as little as I can for labor. ”

“ Blair looked very disapproving.
“Why, Lydia,” she said, “do you mean you don’t believe things? Why, I never had a doubt in my life!” she exclaimed, turning to the minister, who was silent.
Mrs. Eaton caught her breath, and looked at him too, her mild eyes full of pain. “Nobody ever asked me before. I am sorry, but I can’t help it. The Bible says people go to hell; but God is good, so I don’t believe the Bible. But Mr. Eaton would wish me to go to church.”
The perfectly simple logic, so primitive as to stop at “the Bible says,” was irresistibly funny; yet, to William West, infinitely touching. ”

“ Beneath, in the man’s life, were the great tides of love, moving, noiseless and unchangeable, from out the depths of his soul. In the girl’s life it was all shine and perfume and glitter, like flowers blossoming on a rock ”

“ Annie said again, laughing. “No, I know what I’d do. I heard a girl talking about it. There’s a college for girls somewhere in the East, just like there is for young men. I would go to that college and study. My! wouldn’t I study!”
That was the beginning of what some people called the tragedy of Annie Graham’s life, and some the success—it all depends on how you look at it.
Her chance remark about a girl’s college lingered in her father’s thoughts; Johnny Graham had not known that there were such things as women’s colleges. ”

“ And when she grew into a big girl and went to the grammar school, he still knew all about her hats and clothes; and he still tried to save her pretty hands, and sifted the ashes, and waited on her, and was proud of her just as he always had been. There was more than one hard-working woman neighbor who would have been willing to “make a good stepmother” to Annie, and who felt, in all honesty, that the gasfitter was spoiling his girl, and that she just only hoped nothing bad would come of it. ”

“ But in the glow of “saving” the poor child, it was not easy for Sara Wharton to realize that [201] Nellie’s first experience of sin had only reached the stage of the young smoker’s disgust with his first cigar. The young lady, with her carriage and her satin cushions, had come at the right moment—the moment when the expediency of morality had forced itself upon the girl’s little, flimsy common-sense, and she was willing to go shuddering back to comfortable decency; but as for any spiritual perception of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, it did not exist. ”

“ As for the deep and far-reaching causes, the economic and industrial necessities, the vast plans of organizations and trusts, they have no place in this statement of the way in which one ignorant woman regarded their effects—a woman living quietly in her brother’s house, doing her work, expending her little charities, trying to relieve the dreadful misery of those wintry days, with about as much success as a child who plays beside some terrific torrent and tries to dam it with his tiny bank of twigs and pebbles. ”

“ They were not appropriate—the soft, rosy flowers beside the hard face there on the pillow; the face with its thatch of gray hair over the narrow, domelike brow, seamed and cut with wrinkles; the anxious, melancholy lips set in such icy and eternal indifference—the face of the religious egotist, stamped with inexorable sincerity, stern and cold and mean. Not a father’s face. But his daughter had put her handful of snowy flowers on the pine table, their little gnarled black stems thrust tightly down into a tumbler of water. ”

“ Oh, Amy, that’s the kind of thing that makes a man cringe!—I mean a minister. Here is this great, serious, strenuous matter of living—the consciousness of God; that’s what living is in its highest expression. ”

“ Blair.
“If we all said we would have nothing to do with the ‘blood of the just person,’ what would become of the railroads and the coal-mines and the oil trusts? What would become of our dividends from industrial stocks if we insisted on knowing that the workmen were honestly paid? How could we eat meat, if we looked into the slaughter-house?” ”

“ Paul,” he answered, with quick gravity, “there must be reserves—except with God. The human soul is solitary. But for confession, that is different; justice and reparation sometimes [22] demand it; but, again, justice and courage sometimes forbid it. Unless it is necessary, it is flabby vanity. That’s why I said it was bad for the mind.”
“Well,” said Amy, with some spirit, “I don’t believe in taking respect, or—or love, on false pretenses. ”

“ They were walking slowly along under [155] the great elms toward her door; it had rained earlier in the day, and the worn bricks of the narrow pavement held here and there shallow pools of water; the sun struck across the wet grass in a low flood of gold; and there was the scent of young leaves and roses in the air.
“We are poor people,” Annie had said, with an amused look; “I’m going to teach school and wear spectacles, and be very stern and learned.”
“Ah, well,” returned the young man, “it’s the thing to be poor nowadays; it’s awfully vulgar to be rich! ”

“ William West said dryly. “We are all of us in the habit of taking our dividends, and not looking at the way they are earned. Mrs. Eaton is certainly unusual.”
“Well, do you think you can influence her?” Mrs. Blair insisted. “I don’t mean to stay with us; I don’t think that would be possible or desirable now. But to let Mr. Blair give her an allowance, so that she can take care of the children. It is positively wicked to think how she is ruining the children!” ”