“I knew it—­I knew it.  I’ll never try again.  That woman’s mind is a wilderness where her girl is concerned.  How brainless these mothers are!...  Yet if I’d ever had a girl—­I wonder—­would I have been blind?  One’s own blood—­that must be the reason.  Pride.  Could I have believed of my girl what I admitted of hers?  Perhaps not till too late.  That would be so human.  But, oh! the mystery—­the sadness of it—­the fatality!”

Rose Clymer left the High School with the settled, indifferent bitterness of one used to trouble.  Every desire she followed, turn what way she would, every impulse reaching to grasp some girlish gleam of happiness, resulted in the inevitable rebuke.  And this time it had been disgrace.  But Rose felt she did not care if she could only deceive her father.  No cheerful task was it to face him.  Shivering at the thought she resolved to elude the punishment he was sure to inflict if he learned why she had been expelled.

She had no twinge of conscience.  She was used to slights and unkindness, and did not now reflect upon the justice of her dismissal.  What little pleasure she got came from friendships with boys, and these her father had forbidden her to have.  In the bitter web of her thought ran the threads that if she had pretty clothes like Helen, and a rich mother like Bessy, and a father who was not a drunkard, her lot in life would have been happy.

Rose lived with her stepfather in three dingy rooms in the mill section of Middleville.  She never left the wide avenues and lawns and stately residences, which she had to pass on her way to and from school, without contrasting them with the dirty alleys and grimy walls and squalid quarters of the working-class.  She had grown up in that class, but in her mind there was always a faint vague recollection of a time when her surroundings had been bright and cheerful, where there had been a mother who had taught her to love beautiful things.  To-day she climbed the rickety stairs to her home and pushed open the latchless door with a revolt brooding in her mind.

A man in his shirt sleeves sat by the little window.

“Why father—­home so early?” she asked.

“Yes lass, home early,” he replied wearily.  “I’m losing my place again.”

He had straggling gray hair, bleared eyes with an opaque, glazy look and a bluish cast of countenance.  His chin was buried in the collar of his open shirt; his shoulders sagged, and he breathed heavily.

One glance assured Rose her father was not very much under the influence of drink.  And fear left her.  When even half-sober he was kind.

“So you’ve lost your place?” she asked.

“Yes.  Old Swann is layin’ off.”

This was an untruth, Rose knew, because the mills had never been so full, and men never so in demand.  Besides her father was an expert at his trade and could always have work.

“I’m sorry,” she said, slowly.  “I’ve been thinking lately that I’ll give up school and go to work.  In an office uptown or a department store.”