“God!” she said, with a rich, abrupt, and beautifully coarse humanity. “I never saw the like of it in my life! I don’t see where he put it all!” Her voice trembled with a full, rich, infuriated kind of humour. “Everything was there!” she cried, “except the kitchen sink!”
Starwick flushed deeply, and looking at her, said, quietly, gravely: “I’m sorry, Ann. I’m terribly, terribly sorry!”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said shortly, yet with a kind of tenderness. “I’m used to it. Don’t forget that I served three years’training in a hospital once. You get so you don’t notice those things.”
“You are a very swell person,” he said slowly and distinctly. “I’m terribly grateful.”
She flushed and turned away, saying curtly: “Sit down, Frank. You’ll feel better when you have some coffee. I’m making it now.” And in her silent and competent way she set to work.
In these few commonplace words all that was strong, grand, and tender in Ann’s soul and character was somehow made evident. Brusque and matter of fact as her words had been when she referred to the disgusting task just performed, their very curtness, and the rich and coarse humanity of her sudden angry laugh, had revealed a spirit of noble tenderness and strength, a spirit so strong and sweet and full of love that it had risen triumphant not only over the stale, dead and snobbish little world from which she came, but also over the squeamishness which such a task would have aroused in most of the people who made up that world.
To Starwick, she symbolized certain divinities known to his art and his experience: Maya, or one of the great Earth-Mothers of the ancients, or the goddess of Compassionate Mercy of the Chinese, to whom he often likened her.
But to the other youth, her divinity was less mythical, more racial and mundane. She seemed to fulfil in part his vision of the grand America, to make palpable the female quality of that fortunate, good, and happy life of which he had dreamed since childhood—to evoke the structure of that enchanted life of which every American has dreamed as a child. It is a life that seems for ever just a hand’s-breadth off and instantly to be grasped and made our own, the moment that we find the word to utter it, the key to open it. It is a world distilled of our own blood and earth, and qualified by all our million lights and weathers, and we know that it will be noble, intolerably strange and lovely, when we find it. Finally, she was the incarnation of all the secret beauty of New England, the other
