"Been seeing you every day for nineteen years. No, mommer, you can’t keep me hanging round you any more. I got to be free." "That don’t mean you’re not to be kind and loving to----” "Well, I’m _not_ kind and loving. Gawd didn’t make me that way." Her mother grew more and more certain that Angelica had met with some disaster in her past situation. She thought over it at night when she lay in bed, in the day while she worked--thought of it with anguish and terror. Her peasant soul forgot its acquired American sophistication, and craved that age-old solace nowhere to be found in her present mode of life--a priest, a pastor, some one in authority to reassure her. She hadn’t even neighbours to gossip with, as people had in the "old country." There was no one who had seen her child grow up, who knew all about her, and could and would discuss her with kindly penetration. A stranger in a strange land, but--how wretchedly!--a stranger to whom no country was home. Certainly America was not her heart’s land; certainly Scotland, the home of her parents, would have seemed wholly alien; while her husband’s birthplace, to her, was little more than a fantastic dream-land. Unto the third generation does this strangeness persist. Angelica herself had that peculiar lack of ease, that exotic quality; she was an outsider. Her factory friends, too--they were of every race, and they had all become alike. Bohemian, Irish, Russian, Italian--they had all the same air; but it was a foreign air. Their adopted country had undeniably changed them into something different, but it had not made them American. It had made them only strangers. III One morning Angelica didn’t get up. Her mother, in great anxiety, came over to her, to make enquiries, but Angelica drove her away with fierceness, swearing at her, abusing her. "Let me alone!" she cried. "Shut your mouth and mind your own business!" "Oh, Angie, Angie!" said the poor soul. "If you’d only talk to me! If you only had the sense to know how I could help you!" "Shut up!" screamed Angelica, hysterically. "And get out! Don’t speak to me again!" Mrs. Kennedy took up her pail and went out; but half-way up the stairs she collapsed. She sat down on one of the steps and tried to pray; but she didn’t know quite what to ask of God. Because she _knew_; she couldn’t doubt any longer. She knew what was wrong with Angelica! She didn’t really want to pray. She wanted God to do the talking. She wanted to listen to Him, not to talk to Him; to discuss it, to ask questions, to have an explanation, to hear the voice of authority. What was the use of sitting there telling Him what He surely knew? Or to beg for mercy or pity, when what she wanted was advice? Not that vague sort of "guidance" which one prayed for, and which really meant puzzling things out alone as best one could. There was one thing, though---- "Oh, Lord!" she prayed. "Soften Thou her heart and let her turn to me!"