Mamie Carpenter was twenty-one. She could have passed for eighteen;
she knew it and, when meeting new acquaintances, she often did. She
was small and had blonde hair, not white and faded-looking, but real
blonde, which needed only an occasional touching up with peroxide to be
a lovely, gleaming mass of gold. Her hair was not especially thick nor
long, but it waved naturally and Mamie had acquired the knack of doing
it high on her head so that it looked pleasantly mussed and fresh.
Her nose was short and well chiselled. Her eyes were round and blue
and she pencilled them just a little, which gave the necessary accent.
Her mouth was perhaps a bit too full, but her complexion was creamy
and her cheeks pleasantly pink and plump. She had learned that if you
can’t afford many things, it’s better to stick to plain things—if your
figure is good enough. Mamie’s figure was trim and softly curved, with
a roundness that hinted of fat at thirty.
Mamie clerked at the Busy Bee candy store. She had left school in her
second year of High School when, after a series of small accidents at
the yards, her father, a “railroad man,” found himself more frequently
out of work than usual.
She had become tired of school, anyhow, but had kept on going until
then, partly out of habit and partly because she felt superior to her
parents and her neighbours and wanted the further superiority of a
higher education. Her mother could do nothing but housework, and that
but poorly, and would not consider the indignity of doing menial labour
for others, so Mamie, not knowing where to turn at first, and being
untrained, went into the overall factory, one of Millersville’s few
industries. She found the work monotonous and disagreeable. A doctor’s
reception room and a cashier’s cage next claimed her in turn. Both
bored her.
Then she heard that the Busy Bee was enlarging the store and wanted
pretty saleswomen. Mamie knew she was pretty. She applied for and
got the job and had been there ever since. Mamie daily disproved the
theories that, if you give a girl enough candy to eat she soon tires
of it, that candy-shop girls do not care for sweets, and that sugar
ruins the complexion. She nibbled at chocolates at intervals all day
long, and, except that perhaps her cheeks were a bit pinker, her hair a
trifle more blonde, she remained just the same.
To the mere buyer of candy, Mamie was one of the pretty, polite
little girls in big white aprons who waited on you at the Busy Bee.
To her acquaintances and the dwellers in Gillen Row she was old
Joe Carpenter’s girl, a reproach in itself—rather a wild piece. To
Millersville, socially, she was, of course, nothing at all. She did
not exist to Millersville’s smartest circle except as a purveyor of
sweets. She was below even the least important members of the church
societies, who occasionally got into the end paragraphs in Miss
Drewsy’s society column.
Mamie knew how Millersville felt about her, and her liking for
Millersville was shaped accordingly. She especially disliked the
“society girls,” the ones who lived in Maple Road, because they had
good times and did the sort of things she would like to have done. They
could flirt and not get talked about. The girls in the Busy Bee looked
up to them, whispered about them when they came in.
The rest of Millersville Mamie didn’t mind, but she despised those
girls with a keen, sharp, unbelievable hate. She was better looking
than any of them. She knew that. Society? Good blood? Family? What did
they mean, in Millersville?
Mamie scorned Millersville’s social pretensions. She knew that in some
cities, London and New York, maybe, there was society, real people
with generations of good blood back of them, and money and breeding.
People like that Mamie could look up to. But she knew Millersville. In
Millersville, what did society amount to? A joke; that’s what it was.
No one really came to anything, did anything.
The Elwood Simpsons, the leaders of Millersville society—look at them!
There was a little grave in Oakdale Cemetery that Mamie knew all
about—and it was closely connected with the girlhood of Mrs. Elwood
Simpson—and there were other babies who did not die but who arrived at
equally inopportune times. The Coakleys were one of Millersville’s
oldest and best families—and Frank Coakley’s half-brother spent most of
his time in jail, and his other half-brother, Bill, was half-witted,
went around with his tongue hanging out and saying silly things. The
Binghams—ugh—they had to get their servants out of town, and sometimes
at the last minute had to break engagements because some one in their
third floor would cry and scream—their oldest daughter, some said it
was.
Mamie knew other things about Millersville society. The rich Ruckers
made their money getting land away from ignorant farmers. The Bilcamps
made theirs selling fake oil stocks in Oklahoma. There was some sort of
a misrun bank in the Grantly family. It wouldn’t do to look too closely
into the histories of any of them. Yet they were “society” and had a
Country Club—and lots of good times.
Mamie knew she was as good as any of them—better than most. Her family
had moved to Millersville from Lexington when she was thirteen. Her
father had got into some sort of a scrape over a woman—or a girl—she
had never known much about it, but anyhow, it was enough to make them
move. Of course the news of it had seeped to Millersville, made the
Carpenters a bit more outcast than they would have been, though they
wouldn’t have been anything, in any case, without money or connections.
Coming to Millersville hadn’t made any difference to Mamie. The new
house was just as unpleasant as the old. She had had just as good a
time playing with the boys of the neighbourhood, catching on wagons
for rides, in Millersville as in Lexington. She had liked Millersville
all right. She had gone to school rather unevenly, staying at home for
frequent imaginary ills. But a sense of herself had kept her in school
beyond the age of most of her friends.
It was in High School that she had first felt the social barriers
of Millersville—and she had sneered at them even as they hurt her.
The teachers had all been partial to the two stupid Redding girls,
pale-haired, fat and awkward, because Samuel Redding was president
of the school board. Their essays had been praised and read aloud in
the class. Mamie had known that hers were quite as good and that she
was just as clever—and much prettier. But nobody had ever praised or
noticed her.
On Friday nights there had been parties, which “the crowd” attended.
During the week, eating her lunches in the school lunch-room, echoes
of the glories of the parties had reached her—how Marion Smith had
let Harold Frederickson put his arm around her, how much salad Louis
Bingham had eaten. There had been clubs at school, intimate things with
secrets and pins and bows of coloured ribbon; there had been cryptic
jokes handed from one member of the selected set to another, to be
referred to, giggled over. But Mamie had been out of it all.
There had been other sets, less desirable, the church societies,
smaller, less exclusive organizations. Mamie had not been welcomed
to these, either, though by a great effort the daughter of old Joe
Carpenter might have attained the least of them. She had not wanted to
belong. She had not wanted to go with the “society set” of her age,
either. It had been more than that. She had wanted them to want _her_.
But her father, a ne’er-do-well, had been run out of Lexington, her
mother was a slovenly woman with wispy hair, and her home was a grey
shamble in Gillen Row.
So Mamie, as she grew up, did not improve her social position. She
remained old Joe Carpenter’s girl, from Gillen Row.