David covered up his head with his arm and fell back to the wall like my father had hit him. “You yet listen to him?” cried my father, grabbing me by the arm and shaking me. “Didn’t I tell you he’s a Meshumid, a denier of God?” “Have pity! Speak to me! Give me only a word!” David begged me. I wanted to speak to him, to stretch out my hands to him and call him over, but I couldn’t move my body. No voice came from my lips no more than if I was locked in my grave. I was dead, and the David I loved was dead. I married Sam because he came along and wanted me, and I didn’t care about nothing no more. But for long after, even when the children began coming, my head was still far away in the dream of the time when love was. Before my eyes was always his face, drawing me on. In my ears was always his voice, but thin, like from far away. I was like a person following after something in the dark. For years when I went out into the street or got into a car, it gave a knock my heart--“Maybe I’ll see him yet to-day.” When I heard he got himself engaged, I hunted up where she lived, and with Sammy in the carriage and the three other children hanging on to my skirts, I stayed around for hours to look up at the grand stone house where she lived, just to take a minute’s look on her. When I seen her go by, it stabbed awake in me the old days. It ain’t that I still love him, but nothing don’t seem real to me no more. For the little while when we was lovers I breathed the air from the high places where love comes from, and I can’t no more come down. SOAP AND WATER What I so greatly feared, happened! Miss Whiteside, the dean of our college, withheld my diploma. When I came to her office, and asked her why she did not pass me, she said that she could not recommend me as a teacher because of my personal appearance. She told me that my skin looked oily, my hair unkempt, and my finger-nails sadly neglected. She told me that I was utterly unmindful of the little niceties of the well-groomed lady. She pointed out that my collar did not set evenly, my belt was awry, and there was a lack of freshness in my dress. And she ended with: “Soap and water are cheap. Any one can be clean.” In those four years while I was under her supervision, I was always timid and diffident. I shrank and trembled when I had to come near her. When I had to say something to her, I mumbled and stuttered, and grew red and white in the face with fear. Every time I had to come to the dean’s office for a private conference, I prepared for the ordeal of her cold scrutiny, as a patient prepares for a surgical operation. I watched her gimlet eyes searching for a stray pin, for a spot on my dress, for my unpolished shoes, for my uncared-for finger-nails, as one strapped on the operating table watches the surgeon approaching with his tray of sterilized knives.