She saw that she was among a people where the highest known standard--the mode of life regarded by them as the acme of elegance and bliss--the best they could conceive was far, far below what she had been brought up to believe the scantest necessities of respectable and civilized living.She saw this life from the inside now--as the comfortable classes never permit themselves to see it if they can avoid.She saw that to be a contented working girl, to look forward to the prospect of being a workingman's wife, a tenement housekeeper and mother, a woman must have been born to it--and born with little brains--must have been educated for it, and for nothing else.Etta was bitterly discontented; yet after all it was a vague endurable discontent.She had simply heard of and dreamed of and from afar off--chiefly through novels and poems and the theater--had glimpsed a life that was broader, that had comfort and luxury, people with refined habits and manners.Susan had not merely heard of such a life; she had lived it--it, and no other.
Always of the thoughtful temperament, she had been rapidly developed first by Burlingham and now by Tom Brashear--had been taught not only how to think but also how to gather the things to think about.
With a few exceptions the girls at the factory were woefully unclean about their persons.Susan did not blame them; she only wondered at Etta the more, and grew to admire her--and the father who held the whole family up to the mark.For, in spite of the difficulties of getting clean, without bathtub, without any but the crudest and cheapest appliances for cleanliness, without any leisure time, Etta kept herself in perfect order.
The show boat and the quarters at the hotel had been trying to Susan.But they had seemed an adventure, a temporary, passing phase, a sort of somewhat prolonged camping-out lark.Now, she was settled down, to live, apparently for the rest of her life, with none of the comforts, with few of the decencies.What Etta and her people, using all their imagination, would have pictured as the pinnacle of luxury would have been for Susan a small and imperfect part of what she had been bred to regard as "living decently." She suspected that but for Etta's example she would be yielding, at least in the matter of cleanliness, when the struggle against dirt was so unequal, was thankless.
Discouragement became her frequent mood; she wondered if the time would not come when it would be her fixed habit, as it was with all but a handful of those about her.
Sometimes she and Etta walked in the quarter at the top of the hill where lived the families of prosperous merchants--establishments a little larger, a little more pretentious than her Uncle George's in Sutherland, but on the whole much like it--the houses of the solid middle class which fancies itself grandly luxurious where it is in fact merely comfortable in a crude unimaginative way.Susan was one of those who are born with the instinct and mental bent for luxurious comfort; also, she had the accompanying peculiar talent for assimilating ideas about food and dress and surroundings from books and magazines, from the study of well-dressed people in the street, from glances into luxurious interiors through windows or open doors as she passed by.She saw with even quicker and more intelligently critical eyes the new thing, the good idea, the improvement on what she already knew.Etta's excitement over these commonplace rich people amused her.She herself, on the wings of her daring young fancy, could soar into a realm of luxury, of beauty and exquisite comfort, that made these self-complacent mansions seem very ordinary indeed.It was no drag upon her fancy, but the reverse, that she was sharing a narrow bed and a narrow room in a humble and tiny tenement flat.
On one of these walks Etta confided to her the only romance of her life therefore the real cause of her deep discontent.It was a young man from one of these houses--a flirtation lasting about a year.She assured Susan it was altogether innocent.
Susan--perhaps chiefly because Etta protested so insistently about her unsullied purity--had her doubts.
"Then," said Etta, "when I saw that he didn't care anything about me except in one way--I didn't see him any more.I--I've been sorry ever since."Susan did not offer the hoped-for sympathy.She was silent.
"Did you ever have anything like that happen to you?" inquired Etta.
"Yes," said Susan."Something like that."
"And what did you do?"
"I didn't want to see him any more."
"Why?"
"I don't know--exactly.
"And you like him?"
"I think I would have liked him."
"You're sorry you stopped?"
"Sometimes," replied she, hesitatingly.
She was beginning to be afraid that she would soon be sorry all the time.Every day the war within burst forth afresh.She reproached herself for her growing hatred of her life.Ought she not to be grateful that she had so much--that she was not one of a squalid quartette in a foul, vermin-infested back bedroom--infested instead of only occasionally visited--that she was not a streetwalker, diseased, prowling in all weathers, the prey of the coarse humors of contemptuous and usually drunken beasts; that she was not living where everyone about her would, by pity or out of spitefulness, tear open the wounds of that hideous brand which had been put upon her at birth? Above all, she ought to be thankful that she was not Jeb Ferguson's wife.
But her efforts to make herself resigned and contented, to kill her doubts as to the goodness of "goodness," were not successful.She had Tom Brashear's "ungrateful" nature--the nature that will not let a man or a woman stay in the class of hewers of wood and drawers of water but drives him or her out of it--and up or down.