The compliment was so obviously not intended as compliment at all that
the girl flushed with pleasure.
"Then," went on Samson, his face slowly drawing with pain, "I was
thinking of my own people. My mother was about forty when she died. She
was an old woman. My father was forty-three. He was an old man. I was
thinking how they withered under their drudgery--and of the monstrous
injustice of it all."
Adrienne Lescott nodded. Her eyes were sweetly sympathetic.
"It's the hardship of the conditions," she said, softly. "Those
conditions will change."
"But that's not all I was thinking," went on the boy.
"I was watching you lift your coffee-cup awhile ago. You did it
unconsciously, but your movement was dainty and graceful, as though an
artist had posed you. That takes generations, and, in my imagination, I
saw my people sitting around an oil-cloth on a kitchen table, pouring
coffee into their saucers."
"'There are five and twenty ways
"'Of writing tribal lays,'"
quoted the girl, smilingly, "'And every single one of them is right.'"
"And a horrible thought came to me," continued Samson. He took out his
handkerchief, and mopped his forehead, then tossed back the long lock
that fell over it. "I wondered"--he paused, and then went on with a set
face--"I wondered if I were growing ashamed of my people."
"If I thought that," said Miss Lescott, quietly, "I wouldn't have much
use for you. But I know there's no danger."
"If I thought there was," Samson assured her, "I would go back there
to Misery, and shoot myself to death.... And, yet, the thought came to
me."
"I'm not afraid of your being a cad," she repeated.
"And yet," he smiled, "I was trying to imagine you among my people.
What was that rhyme you used to quote to me when you began to teach me
manners?"
She laughed, and fell into nonsense quotation, as she thrummed lightly
on the table-cloth with her slim fingers.
"'The goops they lick their fingers,
"'The goops eat with their knives,
"'They spill their broth on the table-cloth,
"'And lead disgusting lives.'"
"My people do all those things," announced Samson, though he said it
rather in a manner of challenge than apology, "except spilling their
broth on the table-cloth.... There are no table-cloths. What would you
do in such company?"