The Mirror's Truth — Alice Adams

Alice goes to her three-leaved mirror and rehearses her next meeting with Russell: gaiety, then doubt, then a hint of hidden feeling, in profile and full face. Then she stops. She feels no guilt about the picture of Mildred she gave him; she thinks that part was honest. What troubles her is that almost everything else she said was invented on the spot, as if some hidden self kept false pictures ready and handed them up to her. If he liked that picture, he would not be liking Alice Adams. She whispers to the glass, 'Who in the world are you?', and something seems to gather behind the reflected eyes until she jumps up in fright. A minute later she is whistling, rather pleased to be such a queer girl.

At dinner Walter says he saw her downtown 'towin' a barge' with 'that big fish', her hands flying as she talked. He has heard from young Joe Lamb that Russell is a Palmer cousin who is putting his money into old Palmer's trust company and will be made a vice-president. It is a keep-it-in-the-family arrangement, and it leads straight to Mildred. Alice wouldn't run in fourth place, he tells her, almost kindly. He offers to take her to the movies and buy her chop suey. She refuses, then wishes she had gone, if only to keep him away from his friends for one night.

Over the dishes her mother says Walter could still take his place among the nice boys, if only his father would act. Alice laughs: the glue factory again. For years Mrs. Adams has hinted about it, and each time Adams has exploded. On the Sunday before his collapse he stamped about upstairs shouting about 'that danged woman', and frightened her into a solemn promise never to raise it again. Now Alice sees what all the talk of 'something better to get into' has meant.

Mrs. Adams answers with tears. She asks nothing for herself, she says, and would do the washing and cooking for the rest of her life. But no mother could watch a man lock up a horn of plenty in his closet while the children go without. The horn is a formula for a glue that really holds, never written down. Adams worked it out with another man just after they married. That man is dead and left no family, so the formula belongs to Adams 'as much as it does to any one else'. Alice calls it nonsense. Yet as she goes to answer the doorbell, expecting J. A. Lamb on his Thursday visit, she wonders whether there might be something in it after all.