In a berry field, belonging to a farmer named Peter Short, some thirty women, young men and tall awkward boys crawled over the ground, picking the red fragrant berries. Ahead of them, in a row by herself, went May, the exclusive, the woman who walked by herself. Her hands flitted in and out of the berry vines as the tail of a squirrel disappears among the leaves of a tree when one walks in a wood. The other pickers went slowly, stopping occasionally to eat berries and talk and when one had crawled a little ahead of the others he stopped and waited, sitting on his haunches. The pickers were paid in proportion to the number of quarts picked during the day but, as they often said, “pay was not everything.” The berry picking was in a way a social function, and who were the pickers, wives, sons and daughters of prosperous artisans, to kill themselves for a few paltry dollars? With May Edgley they understood it was different. Everyone knew that she and her mother got practically no money from John Edgley, the father—from the boys, Jake, Frank and Will—or from the girls, Lillian and Kate, who spent their takings on clothes for themselves. If she were to be decently dressed, she had to earn the money for the purpose during the vacation time when she could stay out of school. Later it was understood she planned to be a school teacher herself, and to attain to that position it was necessary that she keep herself well dressed and show herself industrious and alert in affairs. Tirelessly, therefore, May worked and the boxes of berries, filled by her ever alert fingers, grew into mountains. Peter Short with his son came walking down the rows to gather the filled crates and put them aboard a wagon to be hauled to town. He looked at May with pride in his eyes and the other pickers lumbering slowly along became the target for his scorn. “Ah, you talking women and you big lazy boys, you’re not much good,” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves? Look at you there, Sylvester and Al—letting yourself be beat, twice over, by a girl so little you could almost carry her home in your pocket.” It was in the summer of her seventeenth year that May fell down from her high place in the life of the town of Bidwell. Two vital and dramatic events had happened to her that year. Her mother died in April and she graduated from the high school in June, second only in honors to Tom Means. As Tom’s father had been on the school board for years the town shook its head over the decision that placed him ahead of May and in everyone’s eyes May had really walked off with the prize. When she went into the fields, and when they remembered the fact of her mother’s recent death, even the women were ready to forget and forgive the fact of her being a member of the Edgley family. As for May, it seemed to her at that moment that nothing that could happen to her could very much matter.