Show Boat by Edna Ferber Page A

opprobrium. You could mark them by something different in their dress, in their faces, in the way they walked. The women were not always young. Magnolia noticed that often they were actually older than her mother (Parthy was then about thirty-nine). Yet they looked lively and somehow youthful, though their faces bore wrinkles. There was about them a certain care-free gaiety, a jauntiness. They looked, Magnolia decided, as if they had just come from some interesting place and were going to another even more interesting. This was rather shrewd of her. She had sensed that the dulness of village and farm life, the look that routine, drudgery, and boredom stamp indelibly on the countenance of the farm woman or the village housewife, were absent in these animated and often odd faces. Once she had encountered a little group of three—two women and a man—strolling along the narrow plank sidewalk near the Hawks house. They were eating fruit out of a bag,sociably, and spitting out the seeds, and laughing and chatting and dawdling. One of the women was young and very pretty, and her dress, Magnolia thought, was the loveliest she had ever seen. Its skirt of navy blue was kilted in the back, and there were puffs up each side edged with passementerie. On her head, at a saucy angle, was a chip bonnet of blue, trimmed with beaded lace, and ribbon, and adorable pink roses. The other woman was much older. There were queer deep lines in her face—not wrinkles, though Magnolia could not know this, but the scars left when the gashes of experience have healed. Her eyes were deep, and dark, and dead. She was carelessly dressed, and the box pleated tail of her flounced black gown trailed in the street, so that it was filmed with a gray coating of dust. The veil wound round her bonnet hung down her back, imparting a Spanish and mysterious look. The man, too, though young and tall and not bad-looking, wore an unkempt look. His garments were ill assorted. His collar boasted no cravat. But all three had a charming air of insouciance as they strolled up the tree-shaded village street, laughing and chatting and munching and spitting out cherry stones with a little childish ballooning of the cheeks. Magnolia hung on the Hawks fence gate and stared. The older woman caught her eye and smiled, and immediately Magnolia decided that she liked her better than she did the pretty, young one, so after a moment’s grave inspection she smiled in return her sudden, brilliant wide smile.
    “Look at that child,” said the older woman. “All of a sudden she’s beautiful.”
    The other two surveyed her idly. Magnolia’s smile had vanished now. They saw a scrawny sallow little girl, big-eyed, whose jaw conformation was too plainly marked, whose forehead was too high and broad, and whose black hair deceived no one into believing that its dank curls were other than tortured.
    “You’re crazy, Julie,” remarked the pretty girl, without heat; and looked away, uninterested.
    But between Magnolia and the older woman a filament of live liking had leaped. “Hello, little girl,” said the older woman.
    Magnolia continued to stare, gravely; said nothing.
    “Won’t you say hello to me?” the woman persisted; and smiled again. And again Magnolia returned her smile. “There!” the woman exclaimed, in triumph. “What did I tell you!”
    “Cat’s got her tongue,” the sloppy young man remarked as his contribution to the conversation.
    “Oh, come on,” said the pretty girl; and popped another cherry into her mouth.
    But the woman persisted. She addressed Magnolia gravely. “When you grow up, don’t smile too often; but smile whenever you want anything very much, or like any one, or want them to like you. But I guess maybe you’ll learn that without my telling you.… Listen, won’t you say hello to me? H’m?”
    Magnolia melted. “I’m not allowed,” she explained.
    “Not——? Why not? Pity’s sake!”
    “Because you’re show-boat folks. My mama