An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

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