The Breaking Point — Alice Adams

Virgil Adams is reading peacefully upstairs when Mrs. Adams enters with grim news: Alice has been left off Henrietta Lamb's invitation list for the big dance Russell asked her to attend. What follows is a torrent of class rage. Mrs. Adams blames Adams's clerk salary, the shabby house, Alice's clothes, and decades of social slights from girls who once courted Alice and now exclude her because the family cannot entertain or retaliate. She insists money is family in this town and that Henrietta's snub is really a judgment on Adams as one of her grandfather's clerks. Adams tries to dismiss the attack on Mr. Lamb, but his wife breaks her old promise and returns to the glue factory demand, sobbing that she will struggle till she dies for her children's happiness. She catalogs the country clubs, houses, clothes, and jewelry other girls enjoy, insisting that Alice once held the town's attention and lost it only because Adams never gave her backing. Virgil calls her crazy for blaming Mr. Lamb for his granddaughter's guest list, but she connects the snub to his lifelong clerkhood and the glue-formula secret he refuses to commercialize. Alice arrives home after Russell leaves, helps her mother up, and when Adams asks directly whether she has a mean time, she tries to lie and then cries. He orders them out and sits alone rubbing his knees, overwhelmed by the impossible choice between integrity and his daughter's pain while his wife's Till I die refrain still hangs in the house.