“You’re just pessimistic—you’ll settle down in time,” counselled Mimi, finding herself interested in spite of herself.
Carl picked up her words.
“Pessimistic! Settle down! I’ve heard those words with variations a thousand times! Why should I settle down? If I’d only work like a slave for ten or fifteen years, make some money, marry some respectable but dull girl who’d have a lot of babies and get fat in a few years, and then drop into a rut from which I’d never get out, then I’d meet the approval of all those tabbies over there as a ‘fine, upright, Christian young man’!” His last five words were filled with distaste for the respectability the community wished for him.
“I don’t want a lot of money,” he went on vehemently. “I want to see things and live things and—and—” He peered at Mimi, somewhat doubtfully and hesitantly, then blurted it out as though he expected to be spanked: “write.” It was almost a shout of defiance. To Mimi there was much of the childish in his gesture of defiance, but there was also something fine about it. The burden of the conversation of the other boys of her acquaintance usually was: “When I’m making such-and-such a number of dollars” or “When I’m a doctor and have established a big practice.” Carl interested her much more than she had believed he would. Indeed, she had not thought about his interesting her. There was some, thing of her own spirit in his defiance of local mores, his words made her realize just how deeply she herself had sunk into the rut of conventional standards.
“But why can’t you write or do whatever you want to do and at the same time work in your father’s insurance business?” she asked sympathetically. “We’re living in a material world—money is necessary—and you don’t have to sell your soul simply to earn a living, do you?”
“The whole thing gives me a pain and I hate it—I hate it!” was his answer. “All I’ve heard since I’ve been back is a lot of men telling dirty stories and confessing the loss of their sexual powers by boasting of their amorous adventures. If it isn’t that, it’s these old women spitting out lies about every woman who isn’t present. I’ve gotten to the place I wince every time I hear something nice about a person—I know it’s liable to be only the preface to a whopping big story tearing that same person to pieces.”
“You’re exaggerating—you’re letting a handful give you an obsession that puts the same stamp on all of them,” she protested. “There are lots of women and men who’d fit into neither of the classes you’ve given.”
“I know it—there are lots of folks like Mrs. Adams, for example, and Hilda, but the trouble is they’re the kind who attend to their own affairs. It’s this other kind that sets the example and they’re the ones who do the talking you’ve got to listen to. … Say, I guess we’d better not sit here too long or they’ll begin talking about you.”
“Let ’em,” retorted Mimi, and she was rewarded by his smile of thanks.
“Nope. You can’t afford it. But you’re the only person I know I could have talked to like this and who’d have understood. …”
Hilda sat beside her mother, silent for a long time. Seldom did her eyes leave Mimi and Carl. Though she could not hear what they were saying, she knew from the absorbed, eager way they were talking they had found some subject of deep mutual interest. To her their blissful ignoring of others was as excruciating as though red-hot irons were being applied to her own flesh. At first she furiously rejected the thought that Mimi was deliberately seeking to attract Carl. As the distant conversation continued she began to toy idly with the notion, turning it over and over in her mind, though it pained her, much as one will constantly probe a sore tooth with one’s tongue.
Then she hugged the belief closely to her, firm in the conviction Mimi was maliciously trying to take Carl—her, Hilda’s, Carl—away from her. She knew this wasn’t true, she hated herself for her distrust of her friend. But back she went each time to that same distrust which bordered dangerously near hatred. It was like meeting a person afflicted with some facial or bodily affliction, a harelip or a glass eye, determining not to notice the deformity, yet fascinatedly unable to keep one’s gaze from returning to the very thing one determined not to watch.
Hilda was all the more ashamed of her feeling toward Mimi because, so far as Carl knew, there was no reason why Hilda should have any claim upon him. There had never been any word of love between them, he had always been rather fond of her in an offhand way, had called her, as long as she could remember, “Little Sister.” She hated the term not alone because it seemed to her banal but more because of the mild affection it implied, vastly inferior in intensity to her own emotion. Reason, however, plays but small part when one’s love is concerned, thought Hilda, and she returned to her brooding. …
“It seems to me you’re making a mistake,” Mimi meanwhile was saying to Carl. “You keep harping on the way the women here gossip—that’s no practice peculiar only to Atlanta and the folks you and I know. Women do that everywhere, it seems to me, and I often think men do more gossiping than women. Does it ever occur to you there are a lot of things on the other side of the shield?”
“That’s the only reason I came back here,” Carl eagerly replied, the look of morbid unrest changing quickly to one of alert cheerfulness. “When I get most pessimistic about our
