“Men always defend themselves plausibly.”
“I’m not defending men; I’m defending humanity.”
She fell silent, and gazed past him again to the twinkling blue of the lake. When she spoke it was less hardily, more wistfully than she had spoken before:
“The world is so big and so interesting. In any direction, if my eyes reached far enough, they would see something thrilling. To think there is so much—and I am refused a crumb!”
“I’m afraid something has happened to disturb you.”
She laughed shortly. “If something should I’d thank Heaven for it! It’s all so drowsy, so placid, and I’m tied to it as if to a stake, with a slow fire lighted round me.”
“But if you want to go so badly, if life here is so unendurable, what ties you to it?”
“The trifling accident of having been born a girl, added to the trifling episode of having lost my parents, added to the inconsequential condition that the forty dollars a month I get for teaching school is all that stands between me and starvation.”
She turned abruptly from him and started down the knoll. He followed.
“Don’t come with me,” she said, stopping. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. After this I never want to see you again. I had to say these things to somebody. By accident it was you, but I hate you for it. You know. Never try to speak to me.”
She went away swiftly, leaving him to stare after her in bewilderment. He was startled. His sensation was such as if he had picked up a pebble and found it suddenly to be a live coal.
Later in the day he found her name to be Marie Ducharme, daughter of a French-Canadian lumber-lack who had risen to be a walking boss. He found that Diversity returned her dislike, or, if it did not return it, viewed her askance as a person who was “queer.”
To be “queer” in a village of less than a thousand souls is no inconsiderable crime.
For the next fortnight Jim Ashe was too busy to give thought to his new environment, to study the new world to which he had been translated. He was studying the clothespin business. It is true he did not come to his work wholly unprepared; being Clothespin Jimmy’s son, that was impossible. His father had talked it, thought it, dreamed it. Jim had assimilated it with his meals. Also, as a boy, before his college days, in vacation times when college days arrived, he had worked in the mills and acquired for the business that distaste which he once vainly fancied was to lead him down widely different vocational paths.