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rd Destiny...." She began to wring her hands nervously. "It seems like telling an idle tale. When you frame the sentences they seem to have existed in just that form always. I mean, losing my mother when I was twelve; and the dreadful poverty of our home and its dulness, and the way my father sat in the sun and seemed unable to do anything. I don't believe he _was_ able to do anything. There's the word Destiny again. We lived in what's called the Mexican section, where everybody was poor. What's the meaning of it; there being whole neighborhoods of people who are hungry half the time? "I was still nothing but a child when I began to notice how others escaped from poverty a little--the Mexican girls and women I lived among. It seemed to be expected of them. They didn't think anything of it at all. It didn't make any difference in their real selves, so far as you could see. They went on going to church and doing what little tasks they could find to do--just like other women. The only precaution they took when a man came was to turn the picture of the Virgin to the wall...." Harboro had sat down again and was regarding her darkly. "I don't mean that I felt about it just as they did when I got older. You see, they had their religion to help them. They had been taught to call the thing they did a sin, and to believe that a sin was forgiven if they went and confessed to the priest. It seemed to make it quite simple. But I couldn't think of it as a sin. I couldn't clearly understand what sin meant, but I thought it must be the thing the happy people were guilty of who didn't give my father something to do, so that we could have a decent place to live in. You must remember how young I was! And so what the other girls called a sin seemed to me ... oh, something that was untidy--that wasn't nice." Harboro broke in upon her narrative when she paused. "I'm afraid you've always been very fastidious." She grasped at that straw gratefully. "Yes, I have been. There isn't one man in a hundred who appeals to me, even now." And then something, as if it were the atmosphere about her, clarified her vision for the moment, and she looked at Harboro in alarm. She knew, then, that he had spoken sarcastically, and that she had fallen into the trap he had set for her. "Oh, Harboro! You!" she cried. She had not known that he could be unkind. Her eyes swam in tears and she looked at him in agony. And in that moment it seemed to him that
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