" The
daughter makes no reply. "I have," he continues. "They're burned
out--kind of glassy--scummed over with the searing of the hell he
carries in his heart--like the girls' eyes down in the Row. For he is
dying at the heart--burning out with everything he has asked for in his
hands, yet turning to Lila!"

"Father," she says with her eyes brimming, "I'm not angry with Tom--only
sorry. He hasn't hurt me--much--when it's all figured out. I still have
my faith--my faith in folks--and in God! Really to take away one's faith
is the only wrong one can do to another!"

The father says, "The chief wrong he did you was when he married you. It
was nobody's fault; I might have stopped it--but no man can be sure of
those things. It was just one of the inevitable mistakes of youth, my
dear, that come into our lives, one way or another. They fall upon the
just and the unjust--without any reference to deserts."

She nods her assent and they sit listening to the sounds of the closing
day--to the vesper bell in the Valley, to the hum of the trolley
bringing its homecomers up from the town; to the drone of the five
o'clock whistles in South Harvey, to the rattle of homebound buggies.
Twice the daughter starts to speak. The second time she stops the Doctor
pipes up, "Let it come--out with it--tell your daddy if anything is on
your mind." She smiles up into his mobile face, to find only sympathy
there. So she speaks, but she speaks hesitatingly.

"I believe that I am going to be happy--really and truly happy!" She
does not smile but looks seriously at her father as she presses his hand
and pats it. "I am finding my place--doing my work--creating
something--not the home that I once hoped for--not the home that I would
have now, but it is something good and worth while. It is self respect
in me and self respect in those wives and mothers and children in South
Harvey. All over the place I find its roots--the shrivelled parching
roots of self-respect, and the aspiration that grows with self respect.
Sometimes I see it in a geranium flowering in a tomato can, set in a
window; oftentimes in a cheap lace curtain; occasionally in a
struggling, stunted yellow rose bush in the hard-beaten earth of a
dooryard; or in a second hand wheezy cabinet organ in some front
bedroom--in a thousand little signs of aspiration, I find America
asserting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things
I find happiness asserting itself in my life.