I may never marry Selwyn, but certainly I shall marry no one else.
How could we hope for happiness when we feel so differently toward
much that is vital, when our attitude to life is as apart as the
poles? When each thinks the other wrong in points of view and manner
of living? Selwyn was born in a house with high walls around it. He
likes its walls. He does not care for many to come in, and cares
still less to go outside to others. Few people interest him. All
sorts interest me. We are both selfish and stubborn, but both hate
that which is not clean and clear, and save from his own lips I would
not believe that in his life is aught of which he could not tell me.
I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him. To
live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its
age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine,
would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be
to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack
of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not
its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of
his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought
Harrie's interest and it is all his now. I would not ask him to live
elsewhere, but I would choke and smother did I live in his house.
And yet--
Ten days have passed and I have neither seen nor heard from Selwyn.
I have often wondered, on waking winter mornings in my very warm bed,
how it would feel to go out in the gray dawn of a new day and hurry
off to work. Now I know.
For more than a week I have been up at five forty-five, and at
six-thirty have been hurrying with Lucy Hobbs, who lives around the
corner, to the overalls-factory, where she is a forewoman. It is
dark and cold and raw at half-past six on a winter morning, and the
sunrise is very different from what it is in summer.
Each morning as I started out with Lucy, and hurried down street
after street, I watched the opening doors of the shabby, dull-looking
houses we passed with keen interest. Ash-cans and garbage-pails were
in front of many of them, and through unshuttered windows a child
could occasionally be seen with its face pressed against the pane,
waiting to wave good-by to some one who was leaving. Out of the
doors of these houses came men and women and boys and girls, who
hurried as we hurried, and with a word to some, a wave of her
uplifted hand to others, a blank stare at others again, Lucy seemed
leading a long procession. Around each corner and from every car
that passed came more "Hands," and each morning when the factory was
reached a crowd that jammed its entrance and extended half a block up
and down the street was waiting for the opening of the door, out of
which it would not come until darkness fell again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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