"You wrote they was willing to keep you."
"They were, but I couldn't ask it of them. I had no right to burden them, and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick."
"I am; but I didn't want you to come back. Lay off your things and come out to supper. We'll talk afterward."
The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on which the girl's eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt's home on the Brandywine--not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of color.
She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. "You will find everything changed," they had said, "because you are changed."
She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Her mother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothing of the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, this letter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by a sense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as a daughter should--they were in some way antipathetic--and now she found herself an unwelcome guest.
Then, too, the West had called to her: the West of her childhood, the romantic, chivalrous West, the West of the miner, the cattle-man, the wolf, and the eagle. She had returned, led by a poetic sentiment, and here now she sat realizing as if by a flash of inward light that the West she had known as a child had passed, had suddenly grown old and commonplace--in truth, it had never existed at all!
One of the waitresses, whose elaborately puffed and waved hair set forth her senseless vanity, called from the door: "You can come out now, your ma says! Your supper's ready!"
With aching head and shaking knees Virginia reentered the dining-room, which was now nearly empty of its "guests," but was still misty with the steam of food, and swarming with flies. These pests buzzed like bees around the soiled places on the table-cloths, and one of her mother's first remarks was a fretful apology regarding her trials with those insects. "Seems like you can't keep 'em out," she said.