We have no
house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets,
in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert
halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."
Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon
made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He knew that
she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, "And yet I
would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers.
We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard
and heavy here. We don't move lightly and easily as you do, and
our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields,
if there were not something beside this, I wouldn't feel that it
was much worth while to work. No, I would rather have Emil like
you than like them. I felt that as soon as you came."
"I wonder why you feel like that?" Carl mused.
"I don't know. Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one
of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a
few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same
thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it.
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