Men often
plunge into dissipation when they are crossed in love,
and maybe Tom would go and be a robber or a pirate or
something; and then he might kill a man and be led to
the scaffold, and he would turn his haggard face to the
howling mob, and say, "All that I am my mother made me."
Say, wouldn't that make her feel cheap! Wouldn't that
make a woman feel like thirty cents if anything would.
Here Pearl's gloomy reflections overcame her and she
sobbed aloud.
Mrs. Motherwell looked up apprehensively
"What are you crying for, Pearl?" she asked not unkindly.
Then, oh, how Pearl wanted to point her finger at Mrs.
Motherwell, and say with piercing clearness, the way a
woman did in the book:
"I weep not for myself, but for you and for your children."
But, of course, that would not do, so she said:
"I ain't cryin'--much."
Pearl was grating horse-radish that afternoon, but the
tears she shed were for the parted lovers. She wondered
if they ever met in the moonlight and vowed to be true
till the rocks melted in the sun, and all the seas ran
dry. That's what Egbert had said, and then a rift of
cloud passed athwart the moon's face, and Edythe fainted
dead away because it is bad luck to have a cloud go over
the moon when people are busy plighting vows, and wasn't
it a good thing that Egbert was there to break her fall?
Pearl could just see poor Nellie Slater standing dry-eyed
and pale at the window wondering if Tom could get away
from his lynx-eyed parents who dogged his every footstep,
and Pearl's tears flowed afresh.
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