Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/164

 decayed smiles—they are living and being crushed between greed and need as between two murderous millstones. Their frail flesh and their little brittle bones, their voices and their pinched insides, the sweet vague childish looks which belong in their faces are squeezed and crunched by two millstones—squeezed, squeezed till their scrawny fledgeling bodies are dry, breathless, and are gasping, strangling, striving frightfully for life: and still are slowly, all too slowly, dying between two millstones.

If it were their own greed or their own need—but it's the greed of fat people and the need of their own warped gaunt parents. Betwixt the two the children meet homelike hideous ruin. Placidly they are cheated and blighted and blasted, placidly and with the utmost domesticness.

The most darkling-luminous thing about the Drab-Eyed children is that they never weep. They talk among themselves and smile their little dreadful decayed smiles, but they don't weep. When they walk it's with a middle-aged gait: when they eat their noontime food it's as grown people do, with half-conscious economic and gastronomic consideration. They count their Tuesdays and Wednesdays with calculation as work-days, which should be childishly wind-sweptly free. Which is all of less weight than the heavy fact that they never weep.