"You can sew very nicely. I'm sure everything you make has real style."
"Go into a shop at starvation wages to make pretty things for other
girls to wear? I stopped along near Madame Cerise's to-day and looked at
some of the girls near the window, with their hair all lanky and their
faces sunk in, working for dear life on finery. Mother, is that what you
want for me?"
There was hungry appeal in Lena's voice, that some mothers would have
felt; but Mrs. Quincy was not on the lookout for other people's shades
of emotion.
"Well, if you'd any sense you'd take Joe Nolan, as I've told you fifty
times if I've told you once. He's got real good wages, and you could
twist him around your little finger."
Lena's teeth came together with a click.
"Joe! Well, perhaps, when there's nothing else left but the poorhouse.
It's pretty tough if I have to marry a mechanic."
"Joe's a good deal of a man. He won't always be a mechanic, Lena. He's
got too much ambition."
"He may, or he may not. Anyway, he'll bear the marks of a mechanic all
his days. I'm not his kind."
Lena rose and went across the room to lean on the little dressing-table
and survey herself in the old green glass. This was her panacea for
every woe. The little pucker in her forehead straightened itself out.
"Look at me, mother," she demanded, turning around. "Do you think all
this is meant to scrub and sew and cook for the foreman in locomotive
works? Because I don't."
She was smiling, but her mother did not smile in return.
"I believe I was most as pretty as you are when I was a girl," Mrs.
Quincy said. "And that was all the good it did. I thought I was making a
grand marriage when I got your father; but he seemed to sort of flatten
out and lose all his ambition after we was married. He didn't seem to
care about anything, though I used to give him my opinion pretty plain.
And it's mighty little he left me when he was took," she added
vindictively.
Her daughter eyed her speculatively.
"Well, I'm not going to be taken in the way you were," she said sharply.
"You thought a good old name and a promising career were enough; and
father didn't keep his promises. I want money and not the promise of
money."
"And where will you find him?" sniffed Mrs. Quincy, to whom "it" and
"he" were synonymous. "I don't notice any millionaires crowding up to
you, for all your big eyes and your great opinion of yourself."
"That's just it. If I could only meet them!" Lena got up and walked
restlessly about the room. Her eyes fell on the last night's copy of the
Star, opened to that chatty column headed "Woman's Fancies". She had
read it with absorbed interest. Her body halted now, for the muscles
often stop work when the mind becomes possessed of a great idea. She
stood for a long time and looked from the unwashed window-pane while a
new resolve slowly hardened itself within.