le margin for absolute
necessity? What would life have meant to him had he never had a day
since he first began to think when he had been entirely free from
anxiety as to the prime essentials? Rosie couldn't remember a time when
the mere getting of their pinched daily food hadn't been a matter of
contrivance, with some doubt as to its success. She couldn't remember a
time when she had ever been able to have a new dress or a pair of boots
without long calculation beforehand. On the other hand, she remembered
many a time when the pinched food couldn't be paid for, and the new
dress or the pair of boots had come almost within reach only to be
whisked aside that the money might be used for something still more
needful. In a world of freedom and light and flowers and abundance her
little soul had been kept in a prison where the very dole of bread and
water was stinted.

She had never been young. Even in childhood she had known that. She had
known it, and been patient with the fact, hoping for a chance to be
young when she was older. If money came in then, money for boots and
bread, for warm clothes in winter and thin clothes in summer, for fuel
and rent and taxes and light, and the pay of the men, and the
innumerable details which, owing to her father's dreaminess, she was
obliged to keep on her mind--if money were ever to come in for these
things, she could be young with the best. She could be young with the
intenser happiness that would come from spirits long thwarted. It might
never now be a light-hearted happiness, but it would be happiness for
all that. It would be the deeper, and the more satisfying, and the more
aware of itself for its years of suppression.

To her long experience in denial Rosie could only oppose a heart more
imperiously exacting in its demands. Her tense little spirit didn't know
how to do otherwise. From lines of ancestry that had never done anything
but toil with patient relentlessness to wring from the soil whatever it
was capable of yielding, she had inherited no habit of compromise. In
them it had been called grit; but a softer generation having let that
word fall into disuse, Rosie could only account for herself by saying
she "wasn't a quitter." She meant that she could neither forego what she
asked for, nor be content with anything short of what she conceived to
be the best. Could she have done that, she might have enjoyed the meager
"good time" of other girls in the village; she might have