Destiny | Page 6

hand, over the kitchen table,
her eyes stole ever and anon to the cracked mirror that hung against the
wall, and after each glance she turned defiantly away with something
like sullenness about her lips. Elizabeth Burton, the mother, and
Hannah Burton, the spinster aunt, went about their accustomed tasks
with no thought more worldly than the duties of the moment. It never
occurred to Aunt Hannah to complain of anything that was. If her life
spelled unrelieved drudgery she accepted it as the station to which it
had pleased God to call her, and conceived that complaint would be a
form of blasphemy. Now as she wielded her broom, her angular
shoulders ached with rheumatism, and, in a voice as creaking as her
joints, she sang, "For the Master said there is work to do!" Such was
Aunt Hannah's creed, and it pleased her while she moiled over the work

to announce in song that she acted upon divine command. To Aunt
Hannah's mind, this lent an august dignity to a dust-rag.
When Mary savagely threw down her dish-towel and burst
unaccountably into tears, both women looked up, startled. Mary was
normally a sunny child and one not given to weeping.
"For the name of goodness!" exclaimed the mother in bewilderment.
"What in the world can have struck the child?" It was to Aunt Hannah
that she put the question, but it was Mary who answered, and answered
with a sudden flow of vehemence:
"Why didn't God make me pretty?" demanded the girl in an
impassioned voice. "They call me spindle-legs at school, and yesterday
Jimmy Marquess said,
'If I had a sister Mary that had eyes like that, I'd put her out of pain with
a baseball bat.'
"It ain't fair that I've got to be ugly."
Mrs. Burton, confronted with a situation she had not anticipated, found
herself unequipped with a reply, but Aunt Hannah's face became
severe.
"You are as God made you, child," she announced in a tone of finality,
"and it's sinful to be dissatisfied."
But, if dissatisfaction was wicked, Mary was resolved upon sin. For the
first time in her eleven years of life she stood forth mutinous. Her eyes
blazed, and she trembled passionately through her slender child-body,
with her hands clenched into tight little fists.
"If God made me this way on purpose, He didn't treat me fair," she
rebelliously flamed out. "What good can it do God to have me skinny
and white, with eyes that don't even match?"
Aunt Hannah's face paled as though she feared that she must fall an

innocent victim to the avenging bolt which might momentarily be
expected to crash through the roof.
"Elizabeth," she gasped, "stop the child! Don't let her invite the wrath
of the Almighty like that! Tell her how wicked it is to complain an'
rebel against Infinite Wisdom."
They heard a low, rather contemptuous laugh, and saw Ham standing in
the door. His coarse lumberman's socks were pulled up over his
trousers' legs and splashed with mud of the stable lot.
"Aunt Hannah, what gave you the notion that there's anything wrong
about complainin'?" he demanded shortly, and Mary knew that she had
acquired a champion.
"Complainin' against God's will is a sin. Every person knows that."
Aunt Hannah spoke with the aggrieved uncertainty of one unexpectedly
called upon to defend an axiom. "An' for a girl to fret about her looks is
worldly."
"Oh, I see," the boy nodded slowly, but his voice was insurgent. "I
guess you think Almighty God wants the creatures He made to sit
around and sing about there bein' work to do. I wonder you don't feel
afraid to eat buckwheat cakes that He doesn't send down to you by an
angel with His compliments. My idea is that He wants folks to do
things for themselves and not to sing about it. As for being
discontented, that's the one thing that drives the world around. I think
God made discontent just for that."
Aunt Hannah moistened her lips. For decades she had been the member
of a God-fearing, toiling family whose righteousness was the
righteousness of stagnation. Now she stood face to face with radical
heresy.
"But," she argued with some dumb feeling that she was defending
Divinity, "the Scriptures teach contentment an' it's worldly to be vain."
"Why not be worldly?" flared the boy with a new and indomitable light

in his eyes. "As for me I'm sick of this life in a place that's dry-rotting.
What I want is the world--the whole of it, good an' bad. I want what
you can win out of fighting. Mary wants to be pretty. Why shouldn't
she? What does any woman get out of life except what men give
her--and what man gives much to the ugly