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
Mrs. Lehntman had now left the evil and mysterious man who had been
the cause of all her trouble. She had given up, too, the new big
house that she had taken. Since her trouble her practice had been
very quiet. Still she managed to do fairly well. She began to talk of
paying the good Anna. This, however, had not gotten very far.
Anna saw Mrs. Lehntman a good deal now. Mrs. Lehntman's crisp, black,
curly hair had gotten streaked with gray. Her dark, full, good looking
face had lost its firm outline, gone flabby and a little worn. She had
grown stouter and her clothes did not look very nice. She was as bland
as ever in her ways, and as diffuse as always in her attention, but
through it all there was uneasiness and fear and uncertainty lest some
danger might be near.
She never said a word of her past life to the good Anna, but it was
very plain to see that her experience had not left her easy, nor yet
altogether free.
It had been hard for this good woman, for Mrs. Lehntman was really a
good woman, it had been a very hard thing for this german woman to do
what everybody knew and thought was wrong. Mrs. Lehntman was strong
and she had courage, but it had been very hard to bear. Even the
good Anna did not speak to her with freedom. There always remained a
mystery and a depression in Mrs. Lehntman's affair.
And now the blonde, foolish, awkward daughter, Julia was in trouble.
During the years the mother gave her no attention, Julia kept company
with a young fellow who was a clerk somewhere in a store down in the
city. He was a decent, dull young fellow, who did not make much money
and could never save it for he had an old mother he supported. He
and Julia had been keeping company for several years and now it was
needful that they should be married. But then how could they marry?
He did not make enough to start them and to keep on supporting his old
mother too. Julia was not used to working much and she said, and she
was stubborn, that she would not live with Charley's dirty, cross, old
mother. Mrs. Lehntman had no money. She was just beginning to get on
her feet. It was of course, the good Anna's savings that were handy.
However it paid Anna to bring about this marriage, paid her in
scoldings and in managing the dull, long, awkward Julia, and her good,
patient, stupid Charley. Anna loved to buy things cheap, and fix up a
new place.
Julia and Charley were soon married and things went pretty well with
them. Anna did not approve their slack, expensive ways of doing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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