Whose pasts so quickly mold and
disintegrate as those of women of Hester's stripe? Their yesterdays are
entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.
For the first seventeen years of her life she lived in what we might
call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants.
Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those
change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station,
a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like
edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a
green slant of terrace. You know--the kind that first establishes a
ten-o'clock curfew for its young, its dance halls and motion-picture
theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert
from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant
vice undergrowth.
Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those
disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even
stopping to pick up the child or leave a license number, was reared--no,
grew up, is better--in the home of an aunt.
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