Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/184

 quently, in the fashion of those who invoke blue blood to compensate for the disappointments of this life. And with Mary Bosanky there was great need for compensation. There was the worthlessness of Michael Bosanky and the poverty of the shack in which they lived by the railroad, and most of all there was Shamus, her son, who was so beautiful to look upon and so different from other sons. She knew that all the blood of all the kings of Ireland could not brighten the wits of Shamus.

And all her life she had as well to bear the cross of her own stormy nature, which was that of one who never found life quite fine enough to satisfy her desires. In the beginning when she was young and had her strength and vitality she managed somehow to wrest from life a little of what she asked of it, or at least she was young enough then to delude herself into believing that she had. She found a strange excitement in everything—in the wharves and the river boats, the negroes and the markets of New Orleans and then for a little time on the river boat where she worked for the wife of the captain. She had a kind of rollicking good nature that was always hungry for adventure, and when adventure did not come she grew bored, and when she grew bored she imagined grievances which convinced herself that she was a creature abused and exploited, and this in turn gave her a reason for quitting the place where she worked and moving on to a new town or a new country. Before she was thirty she had been a chambermaid, a cook, a dishwasher in a Cincinnati saloon. She had cared for children and even worked in the fields at harvest time. She lived almost the