They ate perched on stools at the counter of the little lunchroom next door. Daddy’s hair was almost white now and his face was terribly lined and there were big grey pouches under his eyes. Mary got a lump in her throat every time she looked at him. “Oh, Daddy, you ought to take a rest.” “I know… I ought to get out of the altitude for a while. The old pump isn’t so good as it was.” “Daddy, why don’t you come east at Christmas?” “Maybe I will if I can raise the kale and get somebody to take over my practice for a month.” She loved the deep bass of his voice so. “It would do you so much good… It’s so long since we had a trip together.”
It was late. There was nobody in the lunchroom except the frozenmouthed waitress who was eating her own lunch at a table in the back. The big tiredfaced clock over the coffeeurn was ticking loud in the pauses of Daddy’s slow talk.
“I never expected to neglect my own little girl… you know how it is… that’s what I’ve done… How’s your mother?” “Oh, Mother’s on top of the world,” she said with a laugh that sounded tinny in her ears. She was working to put Daddy at his ease, like a charity case. “Oh, well, that’s all over now… I was never the proper husband for her,” said Daddy.
Mary felt her eyes fill with tears. “Daddy, after I’ve graduated will you let me take over your office? That awful Miss Hylan is so slipshod…” “Oh, you’ll have better things to do. It’s always a surprise to me how many people pay their bills anyway… I don’t pay mine.” “Daddy, I’m going to have to take you in hand.” “I reckon you will, daughter… your settlement work is just trainin’ for the reform of the old man, eh?” She felt herself blushing.
She’d hardly settled down to being with him when he had to rush off to see a woman who had been in labor five days and hadn’t had her baby yet. She hated going back to the Broadmoor and the bellhops in monkeyjackets and the overdressed old hens sitting in the lobby. That evening Joe Denny called up to see if he could take her out for a drive. Mother was busy at bridge so she slipped out without saying anything to her and met him on the hotel porch. She had on her new dress and had taken off her glasses and put them in her little bag. Joe was all a blur to her but she could make out that he looked well and prosperous and was driving a new little Ford roadster.
“Why, Mary French,” he said, “why, if you haven’t gone and got goodlooking on me… I guess there’s no chance now for a guy like me.”
They drove slowly round the park for a while and then he parked the car in a spot of moonlight over a culvert. Down the little gully beyond the quakingaspens you could see the plains dark and shimmery stretching way off to the moonlit horizon. “How lovely,” she said. He turned his serious face with its pointed chin to hers and said stammering a little, “Mary, I’ve got to spit it out… I want you and me to be engaged… I’m going to Cornell to take an engineering course… scholarship… When I get out I ought to be able to make fair money inside of a couple of years and be able to support a wife… It would make me awful happy… if you’d say maybe… if by that time… there wasn’t anybody else…” His voice dwindled away.
Mary had a glimpse of the sharp serious lines of his face in the moonlight. She couldn’t look at him.
“Joe, I always felt we were friends like Ada and me. It spoils everything to talk like that… When I get out of college I want to do socialservice work and I’ve got to take care of Daddy… Please don’t… anything like that makes me feel awful.”
He held his square hand out and they shook hands solemnly over the dashboard. “All right, sister, what you say goes,” he said and drove her back to the hotel without another word. She sat a long time on the porch looking out at the September moonlight feeling awful.
A few days later when she left to go back to school it was Joe who drove her to the station to take the train east because Mother had an important committeemeeting and Daddy had to be at the hospital. When they said goodby and shook hands he tapped her nervously on the shoulder a couple of times and acted like his throat was dry, but he didn’t say anything more about getting engaged. Mary was so relieved.
On the train she read Ernest Poole’s The Harbor and reread The Jungle and lay in the pullmanberth that night too excited to sleep, listening to the rumble of the wheels over the rails, the clatter of crossings, the faraway spooky wails of the locomotive, remembering the overdressed women putting on airs in the ladies’ dressingroom who’d elbowed her away from the mirror and the heavyfaced businessmen snoring in their berths, thinking of the work there was to be done to make the country what it ought to be, the social conditions, the slums, the shanties with filthy tottering backhouses, the miners’ children in grimy coats too big for them, the overworked women stooping over stoves, the youngsters struggling for an education in nightschools, hunger and unemployment and drink, and the police and the lawyers and the judges always ready to take it out on the weak; if the people in the pullmancars could only be made to understand how it was; if she sacrificed her life, like Daddy taking care of his patients night and day, maybe she, like Miss Addams…
She couldn’t wait to begin. She couldn’t stay in her berth. She got up and went and sat tingling in the empty dressingroom trying to read The Promise of American Life. She read a few pages but she couldn’t take in the meaning of the words; thoughts were racing across her mind like the tatters of cloud pouring through the pass and across the dark bulk of the mountains at home. She got cold and shivery and went back to her berth.
Crossing Chicago she suddenly told the taximan to drive her to Hull House. She had to tell Miss Addams how she felt. But when the taxi drew up to the curb in the midst of the familiar squalor of South Halstead Street and she saw two girls she knew standing under the stone porch talking, she suddenly lost her nerve and told the driver to go on to the station.
Back at Vassar that winter everything seemed awful. Ada had taken up music and was studying the violin and could think of nothing but getting down to New York for concerts. She said she was in love with Dr. Muck of the Boston Symphony and wouldn’t talk about the war or pacifism or social work or anything like that. The world outside — the submarine campaign, the war, the election — was so vivid Mary couldn’t keep her mind on her courses or on Ada’s gabble about musical celebrities. She went to all the lectures about current events and social conditions.
The lecture that excited her most that winter was G. H. Barrow’s lecture on “The Promise of Peace.” He was a tall thin man with bushy grey hair and a red face and a prominent adamsapple and luminous eyes that tended to start out of his head a little. He had a little stutter and a warm confidential manner when he talked. He seemed so nice somehow Mary felt sure he had been a workingman. He had red gnarled hands with long fingers and walked up and down the room with a sinewy stride taking off and putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. After the lecture he was at Mr. Hardwick’s house and Mrs. Hardwick served lemonade and cocoa and sandwiches and the girls all gathered round and asked questions. He was shyer than on the platform but he talked beautifully about Labor’s faith in Mr. Wilson and how Labor would demand peace and how the Mexican revolution (he’d just been to Mexico and had had all sorts of adventures there) was just a beginning. Labor was going to get on its feet all over the world and start cleaning up the mess the old order had made, not by violence but by peaceful methods, Wilsonian methods. That night when Mary got to bed she could still feel the taut appealing nervous tremble that came into Mr. Barrow’s voice sometimes. It made her crazy anxious to get out of this choky collegelife and out into the world. She’d never known time to drag so as it did that winter.