The Folks

II. Basement Apartment

praises, the devotion she had always drawn from people like Vanchie, and like Ada Rist, her old satellite in high school days -she had these things to go on, besides the queer absolute certainty that she had always felt, like a tiny glowing core of fire, under the blighting coldness of fear and disapproval and misunderstanding . Out at the farm, she used to run into the grove, feeling that the dark fir trees standing there were on her side. 'that was what she wanted more than anything else-to come to herself. But until a man whom she could love had recognized and confirmed its special kind of beauty, her body would have to stay thin and cold in its alien sheath of self-distrust-and her whole self stay, tight and unripened, within her body. II. BASEMENT APARTMENT MARGARET sat in the train, in the green velvet seclusion of her Pullman section. She looked out at the stations between the wide stretches of country. But somewhere in her mind, beneath these actual sights, was the memory of the car drawn up beside the station platform; and she could still see the folks as they stood there together, looking up at her, while the train was pulling out. All her life she had meant to get away from them. And now, finally, she had go~ her way. There was a dreadful wrench of loneliness in the onward-rushing noise of the train, in the rattle of the couplings, when at noon she went unsteadily through the Pullman coaches to the dining car. The coffee joggled in her cup, and not even the silver shine of the cover that the colored waiter lifted with a cherishing flourish from her platter of sweetbreads could take away the solemn finality of the backward rush of country she was leaving. All the little towns they were passing made her think of home. She kept seeing people who looked like the folks, and cars that were just like their own car. The train stopped, and she stared out at another brownHI and-yellow depot, another town that-with its vacant lots across the track, and its asphalted street under shady trees leading to the business section past a dingy old frame house with a shingled tower-might just as well have been Belmond. The innocent sameness of these towns made her queerly guilty and remorseful, and harassed her with a sense of failure. But she wanted to get away from these places that kept the the sense of failure alive in her-that made her as she had always been, and yet knew she wasn't. The country itself was shadowed over with the feeling that she could find no acceptance in it. It belonged to the folks and the folks' ideas ... the great rolling country, where the rough stubble was getting brown in the fields, and autumn was drying the rich pastures. She had always felt more at home in the landscapes in books than anywhere here . . • in the picture of some old palace garden in the bound magazine copies in the library . . . in the fairytale house with the green door that stood in the midst of the forest.... All the distasteful phases of her meager little history in Belmond were smarting in her. If only she had something romantic behind herl-if she were leaving someone like Dr. Redmond a sad and broken man. No boys had ever kissed her, except Harry and Carl for meanness-and she had scratched and fought back and given them as good as they gave her. She had had her little triumphs, but they had all been the wrong ones. It was Mildred who had won the Gardner Allens!-while Margaret, by some dreadful fatality, had attracted only the Lloyd Dunns. Oh, yes, her horrid little triumphs-but always on the wrong grounds-always with a fatal flaw. Worse than anything elsefar worse-was the smarting sense of her own unsatisfactoriness. But she had never been herself. Only at moments-when she had jumped off the highest pile of shingles in the lumber yard, and won the admiration of even Carl and Harry for her daring. As long as she stayed with the folks in Belmond, she could be nothing but a kind of shadow, creeping resentfully about the edges of things, or staying apart in frozen agony-never able to get into the open. Oh, the folks had their grievances, too. They told her she thought...