The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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you?"
Alice was startled. "Good gracious!"
"What's the matter?"
"Don't you think your relatives----Aren't you expected to go with Mildred--and Mrs. Palmer?"
"Not necessarily. It doesn't matter what I might be expected to do," he said. "Will you go with me?"
"I----No; I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"I can't. I'm not going."
"But why?"
"Papa's not really any better," Alice said, huskily. "I'm too worried about him to go to a dance." Her voice sounded emotional, genuinely enough; there was something almost like a sob in it. "Let's talk of other things, please."
He acquiesced gently; but Mrs. Adams, who had been listening to the conversation at the open window, just overhead, did not hear him. She had correctly interpreted the sob in Alice's voice, and, trembling with sudden anger, she rose from her knees, and went fiercely to her husband's room.
CHAPTER XIII
He had not undressed, and he sat beside the table, smoking his pipe and reading his newspaper. Upon his forehead the lines in that old pattern, the historical map of his troubles, had grown a little vaguer lately; relaxed by the complacency of a man who not only finds his health restored, but sees the days before him promising once more a familiar routine that he has always liked to follow.
As his wife came in, closing the door behind her, he looked up cheerfully, "Well, mother," he said, "what's the news downstairs?"
"That's what I came to tell you," she informed him, grimly.
Adams lowered his newspaper to his knee and peered over his spectacles at her. She had remained by the door, standing, and the great greenish shadow of the small lamp-shade upon his table revealed her but dubiously. "Isn't everything all right?" he asked. "What's the matter?"
"Don't worry: I'm going to tell you," she said, her grimness not relaxed. "There's matter enough, Virgil Adams. Matter enough to make me sick of being alive!"
With that, the markings on his brows began to emerge again in all their sharpness; the old pattern reappeared. "Oh, my, my!" he lamented. "I thought maybe we were all going to settle down to a little peace for a while. What's it about now?"
"It's about Alice. Did you think it was about ME or anything for MYSELF?"
Like some ready old machine, always in order, his irritability responded immediately and automatically to her emotion. "How in thunder could I think what it's about, or who it's for? SAY it, and get it over!"
"Oh, I'll 'say' it," she promised, ominously. "What I've come to ask you is, How much longer do you expect me to put up with that old man and his doings?"
"Whose doings? What old man?"
She came at him, fiercely accusing. "You know well enough what old man, Virgil Adams! That old man who was here the other night."
"Mr. Lamb?"
"Yes; 'Mister Lamb!'" She mocked his voice. "What other old man would I be likely to mean except J. A. Lamb?"
"What's he been doing now?" her husband inquired, satirically. "Where'd you get something new against him since the last time you----"
"Just this!" she cried. "The other night when that man was here, if I'd known how he was going to make my child suffer, I'd never have let him set his foot in my house."
Adams leaned back in his chair as though her absurdity had eased his mind. "Oh, I see," he said. "You've just gone plain crazy. That's the only explanation of such talk, and it suits the case."
"Hasn't that man made us all suffer every day of our lives?" she demanded. "I'd like to know why it is that my life and my children's lives have to be sacrificed to him?"
"How are they 'sacrificed' to him?"
"Because you keep on working for him! Because you keep on letting him hand out whatever miserable little pittance he chooses to give you; that's why! It's as if he were some horrible old Juggernaut and I had to see my children's own father throwing them under the wheels to keep him satisfied."
"I won't hear any more such stuff!" Lifting his paper, Adams affected to read.
"You'd better listen to me," she admonished him. "You might be sorry you didn't, in case he ever tried to set foot in my house again! I might tell him to his face what I think of him."
At this, Adams slapped the newspaper down upon his knee. "Oh, the devil! What's it matter what you think of him?"
"It had better matter to you!" she cried. "Do you suppose I'm going to submit forever to him and his family and what they're doing to my child?"
"What are he and his family doing to 'your child?'"
Mrs. Adams came out with it. "That snippy little Henrietta Lamb has always snubbed Alice every time she's ever had the chance. She's followed the lead of the other girls; they've always all of 'em been jealous of Alice because she dared to try and be happy, and because she's showier and better-looking than they are, even though you do give her only about thirty-five cents a year to do it on! They've all done everything on earth they could to drive the young men away from her and belittle her to 'em; and this mean little Henrietta Lamb's been the worst of the whole crowd to Alice, every time she could see a chance."
"What for?" Adams asked, incredulously. "Why should she or anybody else pick on Alice?"
"'Why?' 'What for?'" his wife repeated with a greater vehemence. "Do YOU ask me such a thing as that? Do you really want to know?"
"Yes; I'd want to know--I would if I believed it."
"Then I'll tell you," she said in a cold fury. "It's on account of you, Virgil, and nothing else in the world."
He hooted at her. "Oh, yes! These girls don't like ME, so they pick on Alice."
"Quit your palavering and evading," she said. "A crowd of girls like that, when they get a pretty girl like Alice among them, they act just like wild beasts. They'll tear her to pieces, or else they'll chase her and run her out, because they know if she had half a chance she'd outshine 'em. They can't do that to a girl like Mildred Palmer because she's got money and family to back her. Now you listen to me, Virgil Adams: the way the world is now, money IS family. Alice would have just as much 'family' as any of 'em every single bit--if you hadn't fallen behind in the race."
"How did I----"
"Yes, you did!" she cried. "Twenty-five years ago when we were starting and this town was smaller, you and I could have gone with any of 'em if we'd tried hard enough. Look at the people we knew then that do hold their heads up alongside of anybody in this town! WHY can they? Because the men of those families made money and gave their children everything that makes life worth living! Why can't we hold our heads up? Because those men passed you in the race. They went up the ladder, and you--you're still a clerk down at that old hole!"
"You leave that out, please," he said. "I thought you were going to tell me something Henrietta Lamb had done to our Alice."
"You BET I'm going to tell you," she assured him, vehemently. "But first I'm telling WHY she does it. It's because you've never given Alice any backing nor any background, and they all know they can do anything they like to her with perfect impunity. If she had the hundredth part of what THEY have to fall back on she'd have made 'em sing a mighty different song long ago!"
"How would she?"
"Oh, my heavens, but you're slow!" Mrs. Adams moaned. "Look here! You remember how practically all the nicest boys in this town used to come here a few