I
ANNIE GRAHAM, the young woman with whom this story
concerns itself, lived in a Western manufacturing town. Her home
was, both inside and outside, like hundreds and thousands of other
American homes, a cheap frame house, in a cheap, respectable
suburb; a house without any other beauty or refinement than
cleanliness and a certain amount of rather coarse comfort. Her
father was a workingman, as his father had been before him. He
was a gasfitter, and went to his work every morning with a greasy
leather bundle under his arm, and a cheerful heart in his breast.
First, because he had plenty of work and, having no imagination,
never worried about the future. But mostly because of a comfortable
fact to which, when not occupied with the practical details of his
trade, he devoted his thoughts; the fact being that there was a
certain tidy bit of money in the bank for his Annie,--money which
he had hoarded up, little by little, saved out of car-fares, and
tobacco, and clothes; money which meant privation and courage, and
slow, persistent, heavy toil. It amounted to a little over fifteen
hundred dollars, and he hoped it would be twenty-five hundred
before he died. What Annie would do with it when he was gone was
the only direction in which Johnny Graham’s fancy worked. Would she
rent a better house, maybe, than this little one they had lived
in since she was twelve; or would she get herself fine clothes or
a piano or books? He thought that she would probably get books.
Annie was so fond of reading! He was very proud of this fondness
for reading, and used to tell his fellow-workmen about it, and say
he had seen her turn over so many pages, in fifteen minutes by his
watch. He timed her, he said, and my! but she was the fast reader!
He had no idea of placing any restrictions upon the way in which
she should spend her inheritance when she got it; he had no feeling
about the money as anything but a means of future pleasure to Annie.
“When I’m dead and gone, the afternoon, maybe, of the funeral,
they’ll tell her. ‘Annie Graham,’ the lawyer’ll say, ‘your father’s
left you a tidy bit of money. It’s twenty-five hundred dollars,’
he’ll say; well, maybe it’ll be twenty-six hundred,--well, say
three thousand. ‘Miss Graham,’ he’ll say, ‘here’s three thousand
dollars.’ Well, Annie’ll jump. An’ it’ll comfort her,” Annie’s
father would think many times a day, smiling, and screwing in his
gas-fixtures with his blackened fingers, or scratching a match on
his trousers, and hunting for leaks.
He had been father and mother to his little girl ever since his
wife died, when Annie was five. He had baked and scrubbed and
cleaned for them both when she was a child, and in his clumsy way
he had sewed on buttons and darned rents and washed her little
face and hands as tenderly as a woman could have done. And when
she grew into a big girl and went to the grammar school, he still
knew all about her hats and clothes; and he still tried to save
her pretty hands, and sifted the ashes, and waited on her, and was
proud of her just as he always had been. There was more than one
hard-working woman neighbor who would have been willing to “make
a good stepmother” to Annie, and who felt, in all honesty, that
the gasfitter was spoiling his girl, and that she just only hoped
nothing bad would come of it.
“Them girls that’s taken such care of,--well, the dear only knows
what happens to them!” the neighbors said, with mysterious pursings
of the lips. But so far nothing out of the way had happened to
Annie. Nothing “bad” had come of the simple, faithful loving that
the child had had.
Annie was eighteen. She was a fresh-looking girl, with an
intelligent face, though a little serious for her years. Her placid
gray eyes had a rather absent look sometimes, and there was a line
on her white forehead that told of thought. Johnny Graham knew
what that line meant. He knew with what intensity Annie had applied
herself to her studies when she was in school, and how, after she
had graduated, and had gotten a place as a “saleslady,” as Johnny
expressed it, she still worked and toiled over her books whenever
she could find time.
“But she’s mostly figurin’,” he told his friends proudly.
That Annie, at eighteen, had taught herself geometry, and had
yearnings for the higher calculus, was a matter of burning pride to
the gasfitter, though he had no idea what it was all about.
“I suppose now, Annie, you know all there is in the arithmetics
on them subjects?” he said to her one night as he sat in his
shirt-sleeves smoking his pipe by the kitchen stove, and looking at
his daughter, who, with her pencil pressed against her lips, was
frowning over a sheet of calculations. Annie gave a little start
and looked up smiling.
“Why, father, dear, I don’t know anything--comparatively.”
“But, Annie, now what’s the good of them lines? Do you cut
patterns on ’em? I seen a advertisement saying they’d show you how
to cut out dresses on a chart. And there was a lot of them lines
drawed on it.”
Annie came over and sat on his knee; she laughed, but she sighed,
too.
“No; it’s just working them out that I like,” she said. “I guess I
like studying; that’s it.”
“Well, you’re a real student, I guess,” he told her, and passed his
rough, grimy hand over her soft hair. “Did I pull your hair?” he
said, for it seemed as though she winced; but she only answered by
taking his hand and kissing it, which made her father protest, and
then cuddle her up in his arms and say, “Well, now, Annie, I think
you’re a real scholar.”
They sat in the kitchen, but not because they had not a parlor,
like everybody else. There was a best room behind the kitchen,
and upstairs two bedrooms, and above them an attic, rented to
Dave Duggan, a steady young workman who had lodged with them for
nearly a year. Of course, obviously--propinquity being the root
of love--he had a tenderness for Annie; and he was referred to
by the women who were not Annie’s stepmothers as her “feller.”
The parlor, in which the gasfitter rarely sat, was as frankly
ugly as the outside of the small, narrow frame house. It had
been furnished according to Mrs. Graham’s taste, and it had been
religiously unchanged since her death. The tapestry carpet, with
its monstrous roses and broad green leaves, had worn and faded
into inoffensiveness, and the red rep furniture had suffered the
same kindly change; but the knitted tidies were new, and the
plush picture frames; and Annie had added the knots of china silk
on the chair-backs; and on the wall there was a snow-shovel,
painted and gilded and tied with pink satin ribbons, and also some
decorated brass placques; on the mantelpiece were two little wooden
shoes,--Dave Duggan’s gift,--gilded and adorned with blue satin
bows, and used as match-boxes.
To Johnny Graham this terrible parlor stood for art and luxury.
As for Annie, she did not know enough to find the snow-shovel
painful, nor even the rolling-pin, another gift from Dave, which,
covered with plush, hung from one corner of the mantelpiece. She
merely thought of these things as “mother’s” and as “presents,”
and valued them accordingly. But she would never have dreamed of
occupying this fine room unless there was company; and, indeed, the
kitchen was far more homelike.
She sat now nestling down against her father’s shoulder, listening
to his story of the day’s work: the fine house on the hill where he
had gone to mend a fixture; the nice young lady he had seen; and
the toilet-table all covered with silver things.
“Why, Annie, now I tell you, there was brushes and combs made
out of silver; and there was five little sorts of silver boxes,
different sizes and shapes, hearts and rounds mostly. Didn’t seem
to have nothing in ’em. I had to move ’em to get at the bracket.
What do you suppose folks has such things for? Now a brush made
out o’ silver is no sense; it’s heavy. Annie, now, would you like
things like that?”
“Indeed, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Think of the trouble they’d be to
keep clean.”
“Well, the help does that in them houses, I suppose,” he ruminated.
“Annie, now, suppose you had a lot of money, would you buy them
things?”
“Indeed, I wouldn’t!” Annie said again, laughing. “No, I know what
I’d do. I heard a girl talking about it. There’s a college for
girls somewhere in the East, just like there is for young men. I
would go to that college and study. My! wouldn’t I study!”
* * * * *
That was the beginning of what some people called the tragedy of
Annie Graham’s life, and some the success--it all depends on how
you look at it.
Her chance remark about a girl’s college lingered in her father’s
thoughts; Johnny Graham had not known that there were such things
as women’s colleges. There were primary schools and high schools
and “pay” schools, where he supposed the swells sent their
children, but his knowledge never went farther than this.
“A college for girls!” Well, why not? He believed girls was smarter
than boys any day in the year; anyway his Annie was. He thought
about it constantly, when, to save something for that inheritance
in the bank, he walked to and from his work; and he thought of
it while he worked. He spoke of it, when he had the chance, in
a tentative way to two or three persons for whom he was doing
jobs of gasfitting. Did they ever hear anything of them girls’
colleges? What was they like? Did they cost money? Once, in the
big morning-room of an old-fashioned house, he spoke to an old
lady who sat by the fire while he screwed a lava tip on the burner
over the mantelpiece. She was an old woman and rich, and so she
ought to know about such things, Johnny Graham reasoned; so, with
the respectful guilelessness of the American workman, he cleared
his throat and said, he wondered, now, if she was knowing anything
about girls’ colleges?
The old woman started, and seemed to see him for the first time,
and put on her glasses to inspect him.
“What did you say, my good man?” she inquired.
Johnny, unoffended by this offensive term, which means, “you are
not so good as I am,” repeated his question mumblingly, with the
old lava tip between his lips.
“I have a girl I’m thinking of sending to one of them
institutions,” he explained.
The old lady frowned and took off her glasses and tapped them on
the arm of her chair.
“You will make a great mistake, my good man. It is a great mistake
to educate your daughter above her position.”
Johnny took the lava tip out of his mouth and stared at her.
“Well, now, ma’am,” he said in his slow way, “I don’t see how you
make that out. An American girl is an American girl; no matter how
you look at it. You can’t educate her above that.”
Upon which the old lady nodded her head and said: “Yes, yes; of
course; this is what I’ve always said; this is what we are coming
to!”
And Johnny Graham rolled up his tools in his greasy leather apron,
and went home, pondering deeply. He was not in the least angry at
the old lady; he was simply incapable of understanding her. But
that night he thought it over, and pointed out to himself that,
after all, if Annie’s mind was set that way, there was no use in
her waiting to spend her money till he was dead and gone.
“I’ll probably be livin’ twenty years yet,” he thought, after some
calculation, “and Annie maybe would be too old for a girls’ college
then. She’d better go now; and anyway it might be a good investment
of the money; she might set up as a teacher, maybe, after she got
learned. They do say Councilman Welch’s daughter got four hundred
dollars for teachin’ in the Primary School; and that’s twenty per
cent. interest on two thousand dollars; I believe it’s a good
thing!”
It was then that Annie came in, looking, it chanced, a little
pale, and, perhaps, a little wistful. Annie was not discontented;
she had no aspirations; only the child was vaguely aware of an
emptiness in her life. And she had stopped at the Public Library as
she came home from her work, and had read an article in a magazine
concerning a College for Women in another State.
“That’s what I’d do if I were rich,” she thought, as she walked
home. “I’d go there and study.”
So she was a little absent, even when she kissed her father, and
heard him tell all about the big house where the rich old woman
lived all by herself, because she had quarreled with her only
daughter.
“Seems strange, now, to quarrel with your children,” said Johnny,
buttering his bread on the tablecloth, and then, tilting his chair
back, eating it with great contentment.
After supper he told Annie what he had planned for her. Her
amazement at her father’s wealth was almost as keen a delight
to Johnny as was her impetuous refusal to use it, and her tears
because he was “so good” to her; almost as keen a joy as her final
yielding to the logic of his urging, that, after all, the family
would be better off if she could teach, and earn a big salary. “Six
hundred dollars, maybe,” he said, stretching his imagination for
the purpose of convincing her.
So it was arranged. Annie Graham was to go away to study; she was
to fit herself to be a teacher; she was to be educated into her
father’s intellectual superior; she was to be raised “above her
station.” Would it be a failure or a success? Would she be happy or
most miserable? Would the little dull, loving, ignorant gasfitter
hold or lose his girl?
Well, it all depends upon how you look at it.
* * * * *
The result of the talk that night was that in September Annie took
the long and expensive journey East, and entered on her four years’
course of study.
Of course, there was no coming home for the holidays; the fifteen
hundred dollars in the bank could not stand that; nor did she
have to come back in the long vacation, which would have been a
serious expense, for the president of the college, who was greatly
impressed by the girl’s ability and character, permitted her to
live in one of the college houses during the summer, and found for
her an opportunity to teach some little children. She earned enough
money to pay her board during those twelve weeks, and did not have
to draw on the cherished bank account.
The beginning of that college life was a strange experience to
Annie,--the quiet, refined atmosphere, the beauty of culture, the
conception of spaciousness and dignity, and the awaking of that
sense of fitness which is called conventionality. To Annie these
things were like the opening of the eyes of one born blind. By
degrees the small niceties of life revealed themselves to her,--the
delicacies of serving, the delicacies of living, the delicacies of
manner and voice and thought. She felt them all with a passionate
sort of joy.
It is curious to observe that by the pure and virgin mind these
things, which may be so worthless in their lifeless formality,
are seen in their real and fundamental nobility, and are accepted
with the instinct of religion. At first Annie was so normally
unconscious of her antecedents that it did not occur to her to
proclaim that all these things were new. And then, by and by,
having eaten of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there
came to her a certain deep spiritual experience; she recognized
that the root of conventionality, the beginning of the sense of
fitness, lay in character; therefore she knew no shame that her
father ate with his knife, or sat in his shirt-sleeves, or did many
unlovely things. She did not like them; but she knew no shame, only
love. But it was then that, very simply, she took occasion to say
that her father, who was a mechanic, had sent her here to college,
so that she might be fitted to support herself by teaching. She
said this because she recognized another point of view, and,
recognizing it, felt a certain lack of straightforwardness in
keeping silent; and also because she was proud of Johnny Graham.
Then she forgot it. It was too unimportant to think of.
She assimilated all these new ideas, and felt them and lived them,
as though she had been to the manner born. Her very face reflected
them. She was almost a beautiful young woman. Her deep eyes looked
out from under her straight, pure brows with a certain high
directness of glance and tranquil self-poise which gave a sense of
breeding which was inescapable. The fact that she had said that she
was poor was only in its way another proof of her superiority--so
some of the college-girls said, who went into schoolgirl ecstasies
about her.
“You know it’s vulgar to be rich,” a young man told her one
evening, as they talked together in the June dusk. It was Annie’s
fifth year, and for the first time she was going home in the long
vacation. A scholarship, and four summers of teaching some little
children in a country house on the outskirts of the village, had
meant that for the last two years Johnny Graham’s bank account had
been recuperating, a very, very little; at all events, there had
been no drain upon it.
And now Annie was going home. She had won the highest honors of her
class, and had even been offered a position on the college staff,
and her happiness was as frank as a child’s.
“In so many weeks I’ll see father. In so many days!”--she kept
saying to herself. And now it had come to Saturday evening, and she
was to start home on Monday. She was walking back from her little
pupils’ house, where she had said good-by until September. She was
not alone.
A certain Dick Temple, a cousin of her pupils’ mother, had a way of
running down from town to spend Sundays with the Pauls, to play,
he said, with the children, and get in some rowing on the river,
and to exercise his cousin John’s polo ponies, and--to see Annie
Graham.
But this last was not so stated in the bond.
He had a way of appearing in time to walk across the campus with
her, after little Kate’s music lesson Saturday afternoon, and once
or twice he had beguiled her into his boat, and they had gone
floating down the river in the twilight, talking of everything in
heaven and earth. Being young, religion had been their first theme;
and then, by and by, love;--in the abstract, of course. A month
ago, they both had feared themselves incapable of experiencing this
beautiful emotion--Annie, because she was going to devote herself
to study and her father; Dick, because he had outlived such things,
and was very bitter and cynical and mysterious in his allusions to
life, which, he said, “he knew.” Sometimes they talked of their
future; and it was then that Annie had told him, smiling, that
she had no such luxurious prospects as those which he had been
outlining for himself,--travel, and study, and the philanthropic
opportunities of great wealth.
They were walking slowly along under the great elms toward her
door; it had rained earlier in the day, and the worn bricks of the
narrow pavement held here and there shallow pools of water; the sun
struck across the wet grass in a low flood of gold; and there was
the scent of young leaves and roses in the air.
“We are poor people,” Annie had said, with an amused look; “I’m
going to teach school and wear spectacles, and be very stern and
learned.”
“Ah, well,” returned the young man, “it’s the thing to be poor
nowadays; it’s awfully vulgar to be rich! It’s queer, now, when you
think of it, Miss Graham, how many people in our class have lost
their money, isn’t it?”
“We’ve never had it to lose,” Annie said; “the family fortunes are
to rise on school-teaching.”
Dick glanced at her with quick admiration in his handsome young
eyes. He was twenty-four, but he blundered over his words like a
schoolboy.
“Miss Graham,” he said, “you won’t mind if I say I think it’s
awfully fine in you, don’t you know, to teach, and all that sort
of thing? Of course, girls do things now. I mean nice girls, don’t
you know. Why, cousin Kate gave music lessons before she married;
and she was a Townsend. Still, it’s people like that, don’t you
know, that can afford to do things like that!”
“I don’t suppose any one can afford to be dependent,” Annie said
simply, “and my father is really poor, Mr. Temple.”
Her beautiful direct look as she said this made the young fellow’s
heart suddenly leap. He wanted to burst out and tell her how much
he admired her; admired? no, loved her! That was the word. Yes, he,
who had thought he had outlived all that sort of thing. All in a
moment he felt that he wanted to tell her this; but she seemed so
remote that he dared not speak.
“I suppose I ought to get my governor to go and call on hers,”
he reflected; “these decayed gentlefolks are death on propriety.
But maybe she wouldn’t look at me, anyway,” he added to himself,
in a miserable afterthought; for she began to speak in such an
interested way of some mathematical work she had to do that night,
that he felt there was no room for him in her thoughts. He left
her at the college door and went back, ardent and despairing, to
confide in his cousin Kate, who, it must be admitted, had rather
a startled expression when he told her he was “all bowled over by
Miss Graham.”
“But, Dick, what would your father say if it got serious? Cousin
Henry has such ideas, you know. She’s a charming girl, but we don’t
know anything about her people.”
“We know they are poor,” Dick said boldly; “but that doesn’t matter
in the least. Surely you are not so narrow, Cousin Kate, as to
think it matters?”
“No, that doesn’t matter, of course,” cousin Kate said doubtfully.
* * * * *
As for Annie, she went, smiling a little, and blushing a little,
upstairs to her room. But she did no work in higher mathematics
that night.
Instead, she finished her packing, and wrote her last semi-weekly
letter of the term to her father. To be sure, he would get it just
a day or two before she came herself; but she would not have had
Johnny Graham miss that Saturday letter for a good deal. She knew
he would carry it about in his pocket, and read it over and over,
and put it on the wooden chair beside his bed at night. Perhaps it
was a little more affectionate, this last letter, than usual; she
told him about the weather, and that she would start on Monday,
and would telegraph him when to expect her. And something of the
progress of her two pupils; and how she had made an experiment in
the laboratory, and had burned her fingers; and--and that she had
met an interesting man, a cousin of Mrs. Paul’s. He had taken her
out rowing once or twice, she said. And, oh! she was so happy that
she was coming home! She could hardly believe that it was true, she
was so glad. And then she said she was always his little girl who
loved him--“Annie.”
Then when it was written, she put her head down on her arms, folded
upon her writing-table; there were tears in her eyes when she
lifted it again.
“When he said ‘our class,’ ought I to have spoken?” she asked
herself. “No, he must know; I told Mrs. Paul. No, no, I couldn’t!”
And all her love and all her pride for her father rebelled against
the slight to him which such a confession would have been; it would
have seemed to imply that he was less gentle in soul than Richard
Temple himself, or any one else.
Mr. Temple saw her at church the next day and walked home with
her; although she kept all the while on Mrs. Paul’s right, while
Dick had to walk on the outside and could only look across at her,
which did not please him in the least. She did not talk to him very
much, but she seemed to have a good deal to say to his cousin,
which perplexed her adorer, for though he had a proper regard for
the stout and estimable Mrs. Paul, he could not see why Miss Graham
should talk to her with such apparent interest, when an intelligent
young man was really eager for a look or a word. He heard her
laughing a little about going home “like a stranger and foreigner,”
she said.
“I haven’t seen South Bend for nearly five years; you know it is
such an expensive journey.”
Mrs. Paul said yes, she supposed it was. “It takes four days
and five nights to get there, doesn’t it? It seems to me I
passed through it once. I suppose those Western places are very
progressive, aren’t they? They are not shocked at the idea of a
university education for women. One runs up against that here very
often.”
Annie shook her head, smiling. “Isn’t it funny to think that people
do really feel that it is unfeminine; ‘threatening to the womanly
woman,’ as they say.”
“I’ve come to think that the ‘womanly woman’ means the brainless
woman,” Mrs. Paul said.
“What fools people are who feel that way about the higher education
of women,” Dick broke in. “It’s incredible! Miss Graham, I shall be
passing through South Bend in a fortnight or so; may I call?”
“Of course; I shall be delighted to see you,” Annie said, “and my
father will be so glad to see any friend of Mrs. Paul’s; he knows
how kind you have been to me,” she ended, with an affectionate look
at Dick’s cousin.
Then Mr. Temple, with an eager timidity so foreign to him that Mrs.
Paul suppressed a smile with difficulty, wondered if Miss Graham
would have time to go out on the river that evening? He knew she
would be awfully busy; but it would be a heavenly evening on the
river! He was so promptly assured that she should not have time
that the poor fellow looked very blank; in fact, he was distinctly
cross in the family circle for the rest of the day. At night he
softened and tried to be amiable, for he was constrained to be
confidential, and he knew that “Cousin Kate” would not hesitate to
snub him unless he made himself agreeable.
“Now, really, don’t you think she’s very unusual?” he insisted,
after having told Mrs. Paul all the pleasant things which he could
remember that Miss Graham had said to him about her two little
pupils.
“If you mean Miss Graham, why, yes, I do think she’s unusual, Dick.”
“Did you ever notice,” said the fatuous Dick, “how softly her hair
grows around her forehead? And her eyes--what color are her eyes?”
“I’m sure I can’t say,” Mrs. Paul answered dryly. “Dick, would you
mind going in and getting me a shawl? It’s rather cool out here on
the terrace.” When he came back she had made up her mind how to
proceed. “Now, Dick, listen, I’m not a snob, but”--
“If you are going to say anything about that beautiful creature’s
working for her living,” Dick threatened, “you might as well stop
on the spot.”
“Of course I’m not going to say anything about her working for her
living; why should I? I worked for my living before I married John.
You know I’m not a snob, but I do believe in class. I don’t mean
to be unkind, and certainly she is a charming girl, and--ladylike.
But--there is something, I can’t tell what it is--that seems as if
she had not always been used to things”--
Dick Temple said something between his teeth, and his cousin flung
her head up.
“Dick!”
“Well, it makes a man want to be emphatic, Cousin Kate,--such
nonsense! Class? We’re Americans, thank the Lord! And talk about
ancestors, I never saw descent so plainly. Look at the way she
carries her head! And her voice, her manner! Darn it, because a
girl’s poor”--
“Good-night, Richard,” said Mrs. Paul, rising with great dignity.
“Oh, hold on! Don’t get mad. Hold your base. I apologize; only, it
seems pretty hard to be down on a girl”--
“You know I’m not down on her; I like her very much; I respect her
very much.”
“Well, then, what’s the matter?” demanded Dick boldly.
“I don’t know. Only I have a vague recollection that when she
came to teach the children she mentioned, in a casual sort of
way, something about--about her home, or her father and mother,
or something. I can’t really remember, but I know I gained the
impression that she was”--
“Poor?” Dick burst in. “Of course she’s poor. She has never made
any secret of that. Why should she? Only a cad would do that.”
“I don’t mean poor,” Mrs. Paul said, frowning. “I wish you would
have some manners, Dick, and not interrupt. I merely mean that a
young man has no right to pay attention to a girl in another class
unless he means to follow it up. I despise a trifler, Dick.”
“You don’t despise him any more than I do,” Dick returned loftily.
“But there isn’t any question of class here. We don’t have any
higher class than hers; and as for ‘following it up,’ as you
say--if a fellow thought there was any chance for him with that
woman he’d follow it up quick enough, and ask her to marry him!
Yes, and he ought to do it as formally as though she were a
princess. She _is_ a princess! He ought to go and ask her father
if he might ask her. Her poverty, which seems to trouble you so
much, Cousin Kate, has no bearing on the situation.”
Poor Dick was smarting with Annie’s apparent coldness and his
cousin’s snobbishness--so he called it; but there was really no
excuse for bursting out at Mrs. Paul in this way; and it was no
wonder that she said good-night with some asperity, and went
upstairs and told her husband that Dick was a perfect goose,
besides being rather a cub.
“He’s twenty-four and old enough to know better,” she said. “Oh,
dear, I do wish his father was here!”
“You’d better wish her father was here; then you’d know the pit
whence she was digged,” John Paul said. “Of course, if he ever sold
cotton by the yard, Dick’s future happiness would be imperiled.”
“Now, John, don’t be horrid,” said his wife impatiently; “you know
perfectly well what I mean. I’m not a snob, as I told Dick, but
there is such a thing as class.”
“If Dick’s worth anything,” pronounced John Paul, standing before
his glass and ripping his collar off the stud with a vicious tug,
“he’ll marry that girl if her father is a hod-carrier.”