Under the nerve strain, big tears began slowly to slip down Mahala’s cheeks. That word “poorhouse” brought something menacing and gravely real to her vision. She knew where the county poorhouse was and what it was. She had gone there with her mother at Thanksgiving and Easter and Christmas times to try to carry a degree of cheer. Could it be possible that such a place threatened her father and her mother? The tears softened Junior. He commenced to plead with her. He said to her: “There’s no sense in a girl wasting time to go to college. You know how to sew and to keep a house beautifully. If you need a little help with the cooking, you can soon learn. You would only have to superintend. I could afford servants for you from the very start. Dad’s crazy about you. He’d do anything in the world I wanted for you. Forget this college business. I can’t eat calculus and radicals or drink syntax and prosody. You’re all right for me and for Ashwater, exactly the way you are!” He started to seize her roughly, but divining his intentions, she swiftly evaded him and swung a heavy porch chair between them, and then, anger surging up to a degree overcoming fear, she spat at him her real thoughts. “You coward! You always have been a coward! You always will be! You never picked on a boy in school unless you were twice his size. You never passed an examination without cheating. You even made the Principal fix up the grades that allowed you to graduate. You’ve never cared what happened to any other girl or boy so long as you were the leader and had what you wanted.” At that Junior turned ugly. He stepped back and began to sneer. “What about the leader you have been, dressed in your fine clothes from your father’s bankrupt store?” Mahala lifted her head and dried her eyes. “I never cheated any one out of their property,” she said. “My father is only one out of dozens of men whose fortunes have been deliberately wrecked by your father. If I can’t afford the clothing I’m wearing, I’ll take it off and put on what I can, and I’ll earn with my own hands what I need to take care of myself and my father, too!” Then Junior shouted with rough laughter. He pointed to her hands, and at sight of them, and at the thought of them being forced to work for a living, he tried to catch hold of them. “And what is it you propose to do with those mighty hands of yours?” he asked. Mahala held them up and looked at them speculatively. “I’ll admit that they’re small, and that they’re white,” she said, “but they’re strong as steel, and if you’ll be pleased to observe closely, you’ll notice further that they’re clean.” Then Junior tried another tack. “What about your mother?” he said. “Haven’t you got the sense to realize that it will kill your father to lose his business standing, to be stamped a failure before the community? Don’t you know that it will kill your mother to be driven from this house and to try to live in skimpy, ugly poverty? Don’t be a silly fool!”