Annie Kilburn | Page 3

a little girl, and of whom she had no
recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he had his
own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall into
subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler
insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine
moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began,
in helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape
the common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and
ailing men must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments
when he recognised the beauty of his daughter's aspiration with a
spiritual sympathy, which showed that he must always have had an
intellectual perception of it. He expressed with rhetorical largeness and
looseness the longing which was not very definite in her own heart, and
mingled with it a strain of homesickness poignantly simple and direct
for the places, the scenes, the persons, the things, of his early days. As
he failed more and more, his homesickness was for natural aspects
which had wholly ceased to exist through modern changes and
improvements, and for people long since dead, whom he could find
only in an illusion of that environment in some other world. In the
pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep him

ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which she
sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were
lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment of
what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for
what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which
she saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up
out of the western waves.
She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite
principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her,
she thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she
would not have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not
admit the existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she
herself was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must
question whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it.
It was not logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious
conclusions; and there was apt to be the same kind of break between
her conclusions and her actions as between her reasons and her
conclusions. She acted impulsively, and from a force which she could
not analyse. She indulged reveries so vivid that they seemed to weaken
and exhaust her for the grapple with realities; the recollection of them
abashed her in the presence of facts.
With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly
introspective. Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful
acquiescence in worldly conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life
of fashion, or at least of society. It had not been without the interests of
other girls' lives, by any means; she had sometimes had fancies,
flirtations, but she did not think she had been really in love, and she had
refused some offers of marriage for that reason.

III.
The industry of making straw hats began at Hatboro', as many other
industries have begun in New England, with no great local advantages,
but simply because its founder happened to live there, and to believe

that it would pay. There was a railroad, and labour of the sort he
wanted was cheap and abundant in the village and the outlying farms.
In time the work came to be done more and more by machinery, and to
be gathered into large shops. The buildings increased in size and
number; the single line of the railroad was multiplied into four, and in
the region of the tracks several large, ugly, windowy wooden bulks
grew up for shoe shops; a stocking factory followed; yet this business
activity did not warp the old village from its picturesqueness or quiet.
The railroad tracks crossed its main street; but the shops were all on
one side of them, with the work-people's cottages and boarding-houses,
and on the other were the simple, square, roomy old mansions, with
their white paint and their green blinds, varied by the modern colour
and carpentry of French-roofed villas. The old houses stood quite close
to the street, with a strip of narrow door-yard before them; the new
ones affected a certain depth of lawn, over which their owners
personally pushed a clucking hand-mower in the summer evenings after
tea. The fences had been taken