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His term of imprisonment was nearly over, and Semantha was preparing for his coming freedom. His demands seemed unending. His hat would be old-fashioned, and his boots and his undergarments were old, etc. Then he wanted her to have two tickets for Bellefontaine ready, that they might leave Columbus at once, and Semantha was excited and worried.
Then she draw'd herself up quite tall, shut her hands tight before her, and walked as fast as feet could carry her straight toward the river." And that was the last that he, my friend, had ever heard of poor Semantha. I tried to dry my falling tears, but he dried them more effectually by remarking:
I soon discovered that poor Semantha was very ambitious; yes, in spite of her faint German accent and the amusing abundance of negatives in her conversation, she was ambitious. One night we had been called on to "go on" as peasants and sing a chorus and do a country dance, and poor Semantha had sung so freely and danced so gracefully and gayly, that it was a pleasure to look at her.
Her figure drooped as though she were weary or very, very sad, and I said to myself, "I don't know what you are looking at, but I do know it's something you want awfully," and just then she turned and faced me. My heart gave a plunge against my side. I knew her. One woman's glance, lightning-quick, mathematically true, and I had her photograph the last, the very last I ever took of poor Semantha.
So as my wet skirt viciously slapped my icy ankles, I almost tearfully declared to myself I would have to have a handkerchief, even though it wore pinned to my wings, only who on earth could get it off in time for me to use? Now if poor Semantha were only and there I stopped, my eyes, my mind, fixed upon a woman a little way ahead of me, who stood staring in a window.
So when we call a friend "poor So-and-So," consciously or unconsciously, there is beneath all our affection the slight garlic touch of contemptuous pity; how else could I, right to her merry, laughing face, have called this girl poor Semantha?
A hideous thing, calculated to frighten children or sober drunken men. I know I should have nearly died of thirst before I could have forced myself to swallow a drop of liquid coming from that horrible interior. Semantha was nervous and silent, and the performance was well on before she caught me alone, out in a dark passageway.
She didn't seem to see me no more, nor hear me, and I goes on louder like, "Say, Semantha! where yer goin' to? what yer goin' ter do now?" and, Boss, she done the toughest thing I ever seen.
At that point I came near speaking, because poor Semantha was not artistic in her make-up, and she painted not only her cheeks but her eyes, her temples, her jaws, and quite a good sample of each side of her neck. But just as I would be about to speak, I would bethink me of those nights when, in the interest of art, I had to be hooked up behind, and I would hold my peace.
Her stepfather then would secretly let her in, though sometimes she dared go no farther than the shed, and there she would sit the whole night through, in all the helpless agony of fright. But all this was as nothing compared to the cruelty she had yet to meet out to poor Semantha, whose greatest fault seemed to be her intense longing for some one to love.
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