Carmella Commands
think you know all. You think we know nothing. You smile down.
“Am-er-i-can-i-za-tion!” Carmella pronounced the word as if she were spelling it. “Be damn!” she added.
For a moment Mrs. Barrington was stunned by this outbreak. She looked at the small, defiant figure, thinking blurred thoughts of immediate annihilation. Never, so far as she knew, had any human being dared to speak to her like that. Her own children—she started as she thought of them in contrast to this strange creature of Little Italy.
Margaret, thirteen. Just Carmella’s age. Margaret was willful, but original—never! And John, aged fifteen. He rarely obeyed. But neither did he verbally rebel. He merely walked a sullen way of his own. For a brief, bewildered instant Mrs. Barrington wished that she too had a child who could speak like that, and who could be taught not to.
Carmella, too, was thinking. She panted in her excitement, like the winner of a hurdle race. Quickly she was ashamed, and she was frightened. Was not Mrs. Barrington the wife of the man who wanted her father’s land? She had meant to be diplomatic.
Keenly she realized that it was her task to straighten out the real estate situation before her father learned that she had betrayed him. Yet she did not want to broach any such subject to the sponsor of the sewing class. In a vague way she realized that this would
[57]
