An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

could hear her: “Pretty quick, eh? And he didn’t seem to see anyone else at all before.”

Then the twain smiled most wisely, a choice bit between them. Ruza Nikoforitch was jealous.

XIII

The reasons why a girl of Roberta’s type should be seeking employment with Griffiths and Company at this time and in 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 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 his 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, God-fearing 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.

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 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