THE BLEEDING HEART
not quite sure that she had found it so both within and without,
having no idea what the headmistress meant. She rejoiced in the abun–
dance of imposing trees, in the pure style of the houses and the
churches, in the venerable graveyards and in the unobtrusive shops.
One was not conscious of any of the working parts of the town, not
of the railroad nor of the filling s-tations nor of the water towers
and the light-plants. Her own town, out West, had next to no trees
and those were puny and half-bald and in no way modified all the
way around. The main street there was a row of dirty doorways
which led into the dirtier interiors of pool halls, drugstores where
even the soda fountain bar had a flaccid look, and small restaurants
and beer-parlors and hotels whose windows were decorated sometimes
with sweet-potato vines growing out of jam cans painted red, and
sometimes with a still-life of a prospector's pick-ax and some spurious
gold ore, and sometimes with nothing more than the concupiscent
but pessimistic legend that ladies were invited or that there were
booths for them. The people here in this dignified New England
town, shabby as they might be, wore hats and gloves 'at .all hours
and on all days and they appeared moral, self-controlled, well-bathed,
and literate. The population of her own town was largely Mexican
and was therefore, by turns, criminally quarrelsome or grossly stupe–
fied so that when they were not beating one another up they stared
into dusty space or lounged in various comatose attitudes against the
stock properties of the main street: the telephone poles and fire hy–
drants and hitching posts. They were swarthy and they tended, on
the whole, to be obese and to wear bright, juvenile colors. Repu–
diating all that, she greatly admired the pallor of the people here
and their dun dress and their accent so that the merest soda-jerk
sounded as if he had gone to Harvard.
In this atmosphere of good breeding and adulthood, Rose was
happy half the time and altogether miserable the rest of it, miserable,
that is, with envy of the people who had been born here of upright
gentlefolk and had been reared in mannerly calm. And Rose, al–
though she was full-grown and had a Bachelor of Arts degree (to be
sure she had not gone to Radcliffe and her education had been a
shabby, uninteresting affair) longed to be .adopted. Sometimes this
longing coupled with her loneliness- it was not to its detriment that
the town was unfriendly but quite the contrary-fretted her so that
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