William Dean Howells

“ 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. ”

“ Savor for a while, but I didn't love her, and I knew that I only pitied myself through her. Don't you see?”
“No, I don't,” said the doctor.
“You don't, because you're too polite. The only kind of creature that I can have any sympathy with is some little wretch like Idella, who is perfectly selfish and naughty every way, but seems to want me to like her, and a reprobate like Lyra, or some broken creature like poor Ralph. I think there's something in the air, the atmosphere, that won't allow you to live in the old way if you've got a grain of conscience or humanity. ”

“ Annie sat intensely searching his face, with her lips parted to speak. “Another!” she said, and the wounded feeling, the resentment of his insensibility to her good-will, that mingled in her heart, must have made itself felt in her voice, for he went on reluctantly—
“It is a family in which she will be brought up to work and to be helpful to herself. They will join me with her. You know the mother—she has lost her own child—Mrs. Savor.”
At the name, Annie's spirit fell; the tears started from her eyes. “Yes, she must have her. It is just—it is the only expiation. ”

“ Annie looked at him with as much astonishment as Mrs. Munger.
The doctor laughed again. “You can't always tell when Putney's joking; he's a great joker. Perhaps he was hoaxing.”
“Oh doctor, do you think he could have been?” said Mrs. Munger, with clasped hands. “It would make me the happiest woman in the world! I'd forgive him all he's made me suffer. But you're joking now, doctor?”
“You can't tell when people are joking. If I'm not, does it follow that I'm really intoxicated?”
“Oh, but that's nonsense, Dr. Morrell. That's mere—what do you call it?—chop logic. ”

“ It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called herself ”

“ The doctor laughed at this.
“Oh, I know,” said Annie, “I know the fraudulent reputation I've got for good works.”
“Your charity to tramps is the opprobrium of Hatboro',” the doctor consented.
“Oh, I don't mind that. It's easy when people ask you for food or money, but the horrible thing is when they ask you for work. Think of me, who never did anything to earn a cent in my life, being humbly asked by a fellow-creature to let him work for something to eat and drink! It's hideous! It's abominable! ”

“ She met Annie and Morrell with eager relief. “Well, Annie?”
“Perfect!”
“Well, now, that's very nice; you can't go beyond perfect, you know. I did do it pretty well, didn't I? Poor Mr. Brandreth! Have you seen him? You must say something comforting to him. He's really been sacrificed in this business. You know he wanted Miss Chapley. She would have made a lovely Juliet. Of course she blames him for it. She thinks he wanted to make up to Miss Northwick, when Miss Northwick was just flinging herself at Jack. Look at her!” ”

“ Lyra was soberer than she had yet been, and Annie felt that she was really gaining ground. “And your husband; you ought to respect him—”
Lyra laughed out with great relish. “Oh, now, Annie, you are joking! Why in the world should I respect Mr. Wilmington? An old man like him marrying a young girl like me!” She jumped up and laughed at the look in Annie's face. “Will you go round with me to the Putneys? thought Ellen might like to see us.” ”

“ You have risen yourself, Mr. Peck.”
“I have risen, as you call it,” he said, with a meek sufferance of the application of the point to himself. “Those who rise above the necessity of work for daily bread are in great danger of losing their right relation to other men, as I said when we talked of this before.”
A point had remained in Annie's mind from her first talk with Dr. Morrell. “Yes; and you said once that there could be no sympathy between the rich and the poor—no real love—because they had not had the same experience of life. But how is it about the poor who become rich? ”

“ We are tired, sir—and I say it to you openly, sir, what has been bruited about in secret long enough—of having what I may call a one-sided gospel preached in this church and from this pulpit. We enter our protest against the neglect of very essential elements of Christianity—not to say the essential—the representation of Christ as—a—a spirit as well as a life. Understand me, sir, we do not object, neither I nor any of those who agree with me, to the preaching of Christ as a life. ”

“ Gerrish was peculiar about keeping a family to itself.
“Well, you'll think we've come to board with you too,” said Mrs. Putney, in reference to Mr. Peck.
The ladies all rose, and having got upon their feet, began to shout and laugh again—like girls, they implied.
They stayed and talked a long time after rising, with the same note of unsparing personality in their talk. Where there are few public interests and few events, as in such places, there can be no small-talk, nothing of the careless touch-and-go of larger societies. Every one knows all the others, and knows the worst of them. ”

“ In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro' had suffered one kind of deterioration which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still not old. ”

“ Being a woman, her opinions were treated by the magnates of Hatboro' as a good joke, the harmless fantasies of an old maid, which she would get rid of if she could get anybody to marry her; being a lady, and very well off, they were received with deference, and she was left to their uninterrupted enjoyment. Putney amused himself by saying that she was the fiercest apostle of labour that never did a stroke of work; but no one cared half so much for all that as for the question whether her affair with Dr. Morrell was a friendship or a courtship. ”

“ Gerrish's servants into my parlour. I will meet them at the polls, or the communion table, or on any proper occasion; but a man's home is sacred. I will not allow my wife or my children to associate with those whose—whose—whose idleness, or vice, or whatever, has kept them down in a country where—where everybody stands on an equality; and what I will not do myself, I will not ask others to do. ”

“ There is no condition of life that is wholly acceptable, but none that is not tolerable when once it establishes itself; and while Annie Kilburn had never consented to be an old maid, she had become one without great suffering. ”

“ In the political world we have striven forward to liberty as to the final good, but with this achieved we find that liberty is only a means and not an end, and that we shall abuse it as a means if we do not use it, even sacrifice it, to promote equality; or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty. Patriotism has been the virtue which has secured an image of brotherhood, rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is realised. ”

“ Peck,” said the doctor, smiling. “Putney didn't leave off my medicine, did he?”
“He never got well so soon before. They both say that. I didn't think you could be so narrow-minded, Dr. Morrell. But of course your scientific bigotry couldn't admit the effect of the moral influence. It would be too much like a miracle; you would have to allow for a mystery.”
“I have to allow for a good many,” said the doctor. “The world is full of mysteries for me, if you mean things that science hasn't explored yet. ”

“ No, Annie,” he went on, “I can understand why Brother Peck is not the success with women, and feminine temperaments like me, that his virtues entitle him to be. What we feminine temperaments want is a prophet, and Brother Peck doesn't prophesy worth a cent. He doesn't pretend to be authorised in any sort of way; he has a sneaking style of being no better than you are, and of being rather stumped by some of the truths he finds out. ”

“ She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but developed an intense admiration for her in every way—for her dresses, her rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner's things, and the house prettier and larger.
“Should you like to live with me?” Annie asked. ”

“ Annie felt the blood drop back upon her heart. She caught at the girlish aunt, who was looking about her with a sense of the interest which attached to herself as a party to the spectacle.
“Oh, Rebecca, where is the child?”
“Well, there, Miss Kilburn, I'm ril sorry to tell you, but I guess the sea-air didn't do it a great deal of good, if any. I tell Maria she'll see it in the right light after a while, but of course she can't, first off. Well, there! Somebody's got to look after it. You'll excuse me, Miss Kilburn.” ”

“ I'm not very goody-goody, Annie; I don't pretend to be; but I'm not very baddy-baddy either. I assure you”—Lyra laughed mischievously—“I'm one of the very few persons in Hatboro' who are better than they should be.”
“I know it, Lyra—I know it. But you have no right to keep him from taking a fancy to some young girl—and marrying her; to keep him to yourself; to make people talk.”
“There's something in that,” Lyra assented, with impartiality. “But I don't think it would be well for Jack to marry yet; and if I see him taking a fancy to any real nice girl, I sha'n't interfere with him. ”

“ The Social Union itself, though not a brilliant success in all points, is still not a failure; and the promise of its future is in the fact that it continues to have a present. The people of Hatboro' are rather proud of it, and strangers visit it as one of the possible solutions of one of the social problems. It is predicted that it cannot go on; that it must either do better or do worse; but it goes on the same.
Putney studies its existence in the light of his own infirmity, to which he still yields from time to time, as he has always done. ”

“ Peck looked up with question, and she went on to tell him of a struggle which she had seen one day between Idella and a small Irish boy for a kitten; it really belonged to the boy, but Idella carried it off.
The minister listened attentively. At the end: “Yes,” he said, “that lust of possession is something all but impossible, even with constant care, to root out of children. I have tried to teach Idella that nothing is rightfully hers except while she can use it; but it is hard to make her understand, and when she is with other children she forgets.” ”

“ Sometimes I think the fault is all in myself, and that if I were not so sophisticated and—and—selfish, I should find the old way of doing good just as effective and natural as ever. Then again, I think the conditions are all wrong, and that we ought to be fairer to people, and then we needn't be so good to them. I should prefer that. I hate being good to people I don't like, and I can't like people who don't interest me. ”

“ There we see the effect of residence abroad,” said Putney. “The uncorrupted—or I will say the uninterrupted—Hatborian has none of those aristocratic predilections of yours, Annie. He grows up in a community where there is neither poverty nor richness, and where political economy can show by the figures that the profligate shop hands get nine-tenths of the profits, and starve on 'em, while the good little company rolls in luxury on the other tenth. But you've got used to something different over there, and of course Brother Peck's ideas startled you. ”

“ Munger, “what do you propose to do? Brother Peck's head seems to be pretty level, in the abstract.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, willing to put the case impartially; “and I should be perfectly willing to drop the invited dance and supper, if it was thought best, though I must say I don't at all agree with Mr. Peck in principle. I don't see what would become of society.”
“You ought to be in politics, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “Your readiness to sacrifice principle to expediency shows what a reform will be wrought when you ladies get the suffrage. What does Brother Gerrish think?” ”

“ But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be if she were a man—excuse me, Annie—is ever absolutely right. I suppose the truth is a constitutional thing, and you can't separate it from the personal consciousness, and so you get it coloured and heated by personality when you get it fresh. That is, we can see what the absolute truth was, but never what it is.”
Putney amused himself in speculating on these lines with more or less reference to Mr. Peck, and did not notice that the doctor and Annie gave him only a silent assent. ”

“ The well-to-do ladies make an effect of outdoor fashion, in which the poorest shop hand has her part; and in their turn they share her indoor simplicity. These old friends of Annie's wore bonnets and frocks of the latest style and costly material.
They let her make the advances, receiving them with blank passivity, or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her how thin she was, but promised her that Hatboro' air would bring her up. ”

“ The minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she remembered that she was a consistent and faithful person, and she said: “The ladies have a plan for raising the money, and they've applied to me to second it—to use my influence somehow among the villagers to get them interested; and the working people can help too if they choose. ”

“ He went out with a dignity that thrilled Annie. Lyra leaned toward her and said, choking with laughter, “He's left Idella asleep upstairs. We haven't any of us got perfect memories, have we?”
“Run after him!” Annie said to Jack Wilmington, in undertone, “and get him into my carriage. I'll get the little girl. Lyra, don't speak of it.”
“Never!” said Mrs. Wilmington, with delight. “I'm solid for Mr. Peck every time.” ”