I've seen what love comes to. I've seen my mother with her hands callous
with work and her temper sharp as a razor edge nagging my father, and my
father cursing out us children. She had a whole city in love with her
and she gave up everything to run away with my father. He was jealous
and wanted her for himself. He got her to marry him. Then he lost his
arm and they were poor and her voice went. I've seen where love goes. If
I married Johnny I'd go and live at Deutra's and I'd have kids, and old
Ma Deutra would hate me and scream at me just like my mother used to. It
would be going back, right back in the trap I've just come out of."
What she said gave me an entirely new vision of life and love. "They
were married and lived happy ever afterward" was what I had read in
books. Now I saw all at once the other side of the medal. It was my
first contact, too, with a nature strong enough to attempt to subdue
life to will. I had seen only the subservient ones who had accepted
life.
Deolda was a fierce and passionate reaction against destiny. It's a
queer thing, when you think of it, for a girl to be brought up face to
face with the wreck of a tragic passion, to grow up in the house with
love's ashes and to see what were lovers turned into an old hag and a
cantankerous, one-armed man nagging each other.
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