this capacity are of some point. For, somewhat after the
fashion of Clyde in relation to his family and his life, she too
considered her life a great disappointment. She was the
daughter of Titus Alden, a farmer—of near Biltz, a small
town in Mimico County, some fifty miles north. And from her
youth up she had seen little but poverty. Her father—the
youngest of three sons of Ephraim Alden, a farmer in this
region before him—was so unsuccessful that at forty-eight
he was still living in a house which, though old and much in
need of repair at the time his father willed it to him, was
now bordering upon a state of dilapidation. The house itself,
while primarily a charming example of that excellent taste
which produced those delightful gabled homes which
embellish the average New England town and street, had
been by now so reduced for want of paint, shingles, and
certain flags which had once made a winding walk from a
road gate to the front door, that it presented a decidedly
melancholy aspect to the world, as though it might be
coughing and saying: “Well, things are none too satisfactory
with me.”
The interior of the house corresponded with the exterior.
The floor boards and stair boards were loose and creaked
most eerily at times. Some of the windows had shades—
some did not. Furniture of both an earlier and a later date,
but all in a somewhat decayed condition, intermingled and
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furnished it in some nondescript manner which need hardly
be described.
As for the parents of Roberta, they were excellent examples
of that native type of Americanism which resists facts and
reveres illusion. Titus Alden was one of that vast company
of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the
world without ever quite getting any one thing straight. They
appear, blunder, and end in a fog. Like his two brothers,
both older and almost as nebulous, Titus was a farmer
solely because bis father had been a farmer. And he was
here on this farm because it had been willed to him and
because it was easier to stay here and try to work this than
it was to go elsewhere. He was a Republican because his
father before him was a Republican and because this
county was Republican. It never occurred to him to be
otherwise. And, as in the case of his politics and his
religion, he had borrowed all his notions of what was right
and wrong from those about him. A single, serious,
intelligent or rightly informing book had never been read by
any member of this family—not one. But they were
nevertheless excellent, as conventions, morals and
religions go—honest, upright, Godfearing and respectable.
In so far as the daughter of these parents was concerned,
and in the face of natural gifts which fitted her for something
better than this world from which she derived, she was still,
in part, at least, a reflection of the religious and moral
notions there and then prevailing,—the views of the local
ministers and the laity in general. At the same time,
because of a warm, imaginative, sensuous temperament,
she was filled—once she reached fifteen and sixteen—with
the world-old dream of all of Eve’s daughters from the
homeliest to the fairest—that her beauty or charm might
some day and ere long smite bewitchingly and so irresistibly
the soul of a given man or men.
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So it was that although throughout her infancy and girlhood
she was compelled to hear of and share a depriving and
toilsome poverty, still, because of her innate imagination,
she was always thinking of something better. Maybe, some
day, who knew, a larger city like Albany or Utica! A newer
and greater life.
And then what dreams! And in the orchard of a spring day
later, between her fourteenth and eighteenth years when
the early May sun was making pink lamps of every aged
tree and the ground was pinkly carpeted with the falling and
odorous petals, she would stand and breathe and
sometimes laugh, or even sigh, her arms upreached or
thrown wide to life. To be alive! To have youth and the
world before one. To think of the eyes and the smile of
some youth of the region who by the merest chance had
passed her and looked, and who might never look again,
but who, nevertheless, in so doing, had stirred her young
soul to dreams.
None the less she was shy, and hence recessive—afraid of
men, especially the more ordinary types common to this
region. And these in turn, repulsed by her shyness and
refinement, tended to recede from her, for all of her physical
charm, which was too delicate for this region. Nevertheless,
at the age of sixteen, having repaired to Biltz, in order to
work in Appleman’s Dry Goods Store for five dollars a
week, she saw many young men who attracted her. But
here because of her mood in regard to her family’s position,
as well as the fact that to her inexperienced eyes they
appeared so much better placed than herself, she was
convinced that they would not be interested in her. And
here again it was her own mood that succeeded in
alienating them almost completely. Nevertheless she
remained working for Mr. Appleman until she was between
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eighteen and nineteen, all the while sensing that she was
really doing nothing for herself because she was too closely
identified with her home and her family, who appeared to
need her.
And then about this time, an almost revolutionary thing for
this part of the world occurred. For because of the
cheapness of labor in such an extremely rural section, a
small hosiery plant was built at Trippetts Mills. And though
Roberta, because of the views and standards that prevailed
hereabout, had somehow conceived of this type of work as
beneath her, still she was fascinated by the reports of the
high wages to be paid. Accordingly she repaired to
Trippetts Mills, where, boarding at the house of a neighbor
who had previously lived in Biltz, and returning home every
Saturday afternoon, she planned to bring together the
means for some further form of practical education—a
course at a business college at Homer or Lycurgus or
somewhere which might fit her for something better—
bookkeeping or stenography.
And in connection with this dream and this attempted
saving two years went by. And in the meanwhile, although
she earned more money (eventually twelve dollars a week),
still, because various members of her family required so
many little things and she desired to alleviate to a degree
the privations of these others from which she suffered,
nearly all that she earned went to them.
And again here, as at Biltz, most of the youths of the town
who were better suited to her intellectually and
temperamentally—still looked upon the mere factory type
as beneath them in many ways. And although Roberta was
far from being that type, still having associated herself with
them she was inclined to absorb some of their psychology
in regard to themselves. Indeed by then she was fairly well
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satisfied that no one of these here in whom she was
interested would be interested in her—at least not with any
legitimate intentions.
And then two things occurred which caused her to think, not
only seriously of marriage, but of her own future, whether
she married or not. For her sister, Agnes, now twenty, and
three years her junior, having recently reëncountered a
young schoolmaster who some time before had conducted
the district school near the Alden farm, and finding him
more to her taste now than when she had been in school,
had decided to marry him. And this meant, as Roberta saw
it, that she was about to take on the appearance of a
spinster unless she married soon. Yet she did not quite see
what was to be done until the hosiery factory at Trippetts
Mills suddenly closed, never to reopen. And then, in order
to assist her mother, as well as help with her sister’s
wedding, she returned to Biltz.
But then there came a third thing which decidedly affected
her dreams and plans. Grace Marr, a girl whom she had
met at Trippetts Mills, had gone to Lycurgus and after a few
weeks there had managed to connect herself with the
Finchley Vacuum Cleaner Company at a salary of fifteen
dollars a week and at once wrote to Roberta telling her of
the opportunities that were then present in Lycurgus. For in
passing the Griffiths Company, which she did daily, she had
seen a large sign posted over the east employment door
reading “Girls Wanted.” And inquiry revealed the fact that
girls at this company were always started at nine or ten
dollars, quickly taught some one of the various phases of
piece work and then, once they were proficient, were