Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to
the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of
achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than
reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity--and none of
it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food,
sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs
and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of
faith, hoping for a life to come.
Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on
Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay
beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he
thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been
marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as
he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the
dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the
days before his mother's illness and to get again the strong belief in his
own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged
him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him.
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