Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/247

 hall without sticking fast—and Hiram's queer Dutch wife"

She stopped, silenced by the scantiness of her vocabulary, but through her mind still whirled wordless out cries of rebellion. Her one brief visit to the city rose before her with all the horror of the inexplicable, strange, and repellent life which it had revealed to her. The very conveniences of the compact city apartment were included in her revulsion from all that it meant. The very kindnesses of the pretty, plump German woman who was her daughter-in-law startled and repelled her, as did the familiar, easy, loud-voiced affection of the blond young German-Americans who were her grandchildren. Even her own son, Hiram, become half Teutonic through the influence of his business and social relations among the Germans, seemed alien and remote to her. The stout, beer-drinking, good-natured and easygoing man seemed another person from the shy, stiff lad who had gone away from them many years ago, looking so like his father at nineteen that his mother choked to see him.

She passed in review all the small rooms of her son's home, "strung along the hall like buttons on a string," and thought of the three flights of stairs which were the only escape from them—three long, steep flights, which left her breathless, her knees trembling under her great weight, and which led out on the narrow side street, full of noisy, impertinent children and clattering traffic. Beyond that, nothing—a city full of strangers whose every thought and way of life were foreign to her, whose very breath came in hurried, feverish gasps, who exhaled, as they passed her, an almost palpable