Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle LenaStein, Gertrude
General
Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena
Stein, Gertrude
Working class women -- Fiction
me with the dishes and everything will come off better for you. You
see if I ain't right by what I tell you. You just stop crying now Lena
quick, or else I scold you."
Lena still choked a little and was very miserable inside her but she
did everything just as the cook told her.
The girls Lena always sat with were very sorry to see her look so sad
with her trouble. Mary the Irish girl sometimes got very angry with
her. Mary was always very hot when she talked to Lena's aunt Mathilda,
who thought she was so grand, and had such stupid, stuck up daughters.
Mary wouldn't be a fat fool like that ugly tempered Mathilda Haydon,
not for anything anybody could ever give her. How Lena could keep on
going there so much when they all always acted as if she was just dirt
to them, Mary never could see. But Lena never had any sense of how she
should make people stand round for her, and that was always all the
trouble with her. And poor Lena, she was so stupid to be sorry for
losing that gawky fool who didn't ever know what he wanted and just
said "ja" to his mamma and his papa, like a baby, and was scared to
look at a girl straight, and then sneaked away the last day like as
if somebody was going to do something to him. Disgrace, Lena talking
about disgrace! It was a disgrace for a girl to be seen with the likes
of him, let alone to be married to him. But that poor Lena, she never
did know how to show herself off for what she was really. Disgrace to
have him go away and leave her. Mary would just like to get a chance
to show him. If Lena wasn't worth fifteen like Herman Kreder, Mary
would just eat her own head all up. It was a good riddance Lena had of
that Herman Kreder and his stingy, dirty parents, and if Lena didn't
stop crying about it,--Mary would just naturally despise her.
Poor Lena, she knew very well how Mary meant it all, this she was
always saying to her. But Lena was very miserable inside her. She felt
the disgrace it was for a decent german girl that a man should go away
and leave her. Lena knew very well that her aunt was right when she
said the way Herman had acted to her was a disgrace to everyone that
knew her. Mary and Nellie and the other girls she always sat with were
always very good to Lena but that did not make her trouble any better.
It was a disgrace the way Lena had been left, to any decent family,
and that could never be made any different to her.
And so the slow days wore on, and Lena never saw her Aunt Mathilda. At
last on Sunday she got word by a boy to go and see her aunt Mathilda.
Lena's heart beat quick for she was very nervous now with all this
that had happened to her. She went just as quickly as she could to see
her Aunt Mathilda.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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