When she came out the fog was beginning to lift over the lake and
there was even an impression of watery lemon-coloured sunshine behind
the bank of gray. Lottie's spirits soared. As she stepped into the
swaying old electric there came over her a little swooping sensation of
freedom. It was good to be going about one's business thus, alone. No
one to say, "Slower! Not so fast!" No one to choose the maelstrom of
State and Madison streets as the spot in which to ask her opinion as to
whether this sample of silk matched this bit of cloth. A licorice lane
of smooth black roadway ahead. Down Hyde Park Boulevard and across to
Drexel. Down the long empty stretch of that fine avenue at a spanking
speed--spanking, that is, for the ancient electric whose inside
protested at every revolution of the wheels. She negotiated the narrows
of lower Michigan Avenue and emerged into the gracious sweep of that
street as it widened at Twelfth. She always caught her breath a little
at the spaciousness and magnificence of those blocks between Twelfth
and Randolph. The new Field Columbian museum, a white wraith, rose out
of the lake mist at her right. Already it was smudged with the smoke
of the I. C. engines. A pity, Lottie thought. She always felt civic
when driving down Michigan. On one side Grant Park and the lake beyond;
on the other the smart shops. You had to keep eyes ahead, but now and
then, out of the corner of them, you caught tantalising glimpses of a
scarlet velvet evening wrap in the window of the Blackstone shop; a
chic and trickily simple poiret twill in Vogue; the glint of silver as
you flashed past a jeweller's; the sooted façade of the Art Institute.
She loved it. It exhilarated her. She felt young, and free, and rather
important. The sombre old house on Prairie ceased to dominate her
for the time. What fun it would be to stay down for lunch with Emma
Barton--wise, humourous, understanding Emma Barton. Maybe they could
get hold of Winnie Steppler, too. Then, later, she might prowl around
looking at the new cloth dresses for spring.
Well, she couldn't. That was all there was to it.
She parked the electric and entered the grim black pile that was the
City Hall and County Building, threaded her way among the cuspidors of
the dingy entrance hall, stepped out of the elevator on the floor that
held Judge Barton's court: the Girls' Court. The attendant at the door
knew her. There was no entering Judge Barton's court as a public place
of entertainment. In the ante-room red-eyed girls and shawled mothers
were watching the closed door in mingled patience and fear. Girls.
Sullen girls, bold girls, frightened girls. Girls who had never heard
of the Ten Commandments and who had broken most of them. Girls who
had not waited for the apple of life to drop ripe into their laps but
had twisted it off the tree and bitten deep into the fruit and found
the taste of gall in their mouths. Tear-stained, bedraggled, wretched
girls; defiant girls; silk-clad, contemptuous, staring girls. Girls
who had rehearsed their rôles, prepared for stern justice in uniform.
Girls who bristled with resentment against life, against law, against
maternal authority. They did not suspect how completely they were to be
disarmed by a small woman with a misleadingly mild face, graying hair,
and eyes that--well, it was hard to tell about those eyes. They looked
at you--they looked at you and through you.... What was that you had
planned to say ... what was that you had.... Oh, for God's sakes, ma,
shut up your crying! Between the girls in their sleazy silk stockings
and the mothers in their shapeless shawls lay the rotten root of the
trouble. New America and the Old World, out of sympathy with each
other, uncomprehending, resentful. The girls in the outer room rustled,
and twisted, and jerked, and sobbed, and whispered, and shrugged,
and scowled; and stared furtively at each other. But the shawled and
formless older women stood or sat animal-like in their patience, their
eyes on the closed door.
Lottie wondered if she could pick Jennie from among them. She even
thought of asking for her, but she quickly decided against that. Better
to see Emma Barton first.
It lacked just five minutes of ten. Lottie nodded to the woman who
guarded the door and passed through the little room in which Judge
Barton held court, to the private office beyond. Never was less
official-looking hall of justice than that little court room. It
resembled a more than ordinarily pleasant business office. A long flat
table on a platform four or five inches above the floor. Half a dozen
chairs ranged about the wall. A vase of spring flowers--jonquils,
tulips, mignonette--on the table. Not a carefully planned "woman's
touch." Someone was always sending flowers to Judge Barton. She
was that kind of woman. You were struck with the absence of
official-looking papers, documents, files. All the paraphernalia of red
tape was absent.
Judge Barton sat in the cubby-hole of an office just beyond this, a
girl stenographer at her elbow. Outside the great window the City Hall
pigeons strutted and purled. Bright-eyed and alert as an early robin,
the judge looked up as Lottie came in. She took Lottie's hand in her
own firm fingers.
"Well!" Then they smiled at each other, these two women. "You'll stay
down and have lunch with me. I've the whole afternoon--Saturday."
"I can't."
"Of course you can. Why not?"
"I've got to be home by noon to take mother to market and to----"
"It sounds like nonsense to me," Emma Barton said, gently. And,
somehow, it did sound like nonsense.
Lottie flushed like a school-girl. "I suppose it does----" she broke
off, abruptly. "I came down to talk to you about Jennie. Jennie's the
sister of Belle's housemaid, Gussie, and she's in trouble. Her case
comes up before you this morning."
Emma Barton's eyes travelled swiftly over the charted sheets before
her. "Jennie? Jennie?--Jeannette Kromek?"
"Jeannette."
"I see," said Judge Barton, just as Lottie had before her in Belle's
kitchen that morning. She glanced at the chart of Jennie's case.
A common enough case in that court. She listened as Lottie talked
briefly. She knew the Jennie kind; Jennie in rebellion against a
treadmill of working and eating and sleeping. Jennie, the grub, vainly
trying to transform herself into Jeannette the butterfly. Excitement,
life, admiration, pretty clothes, "a chance." That was what the
Jeannettes vaguely desired: a chance.
Judge Barton did not waste any time on sentiment. She did not walk
to the window and gaze out upon the great gray city stretched
below. She did not say, "Poor little broken butterfly." She had not
become head of this judicature thus. She said, "The world's full of
Jennie--Jeannettes. I wonder there aren't more of them." The soft
bright eyes were on Lottie. They said, "You're one, you know." But she
did not utter the thought aloud. She glanced at her watch then (it
actually hung from an old-fashioned chatelaine pinned near her right
shoulder), rose and led the way into the larger room, followed by
Lottie and the girl stenographer. She mounted the low platform, slipped
into the chair at the desk.
She had placed the chart of Jennie's case uppermost on the table, was
about to have the case summoned when the door flew open and Winnie
Steppler entered. Doors always flew open before Winnie's entrance.
White-haired, pink-cheeked as a girl, looming vast and imposing in
her blue cloak and gray furs, she looked more the grande dame on an
errand of mercy than a newspaper reporter on the job. She rarely got
a story in Judge Barton's court because Judge Barton's girls' names
were carefully kept out of the glare of publicity. The human quality
in the place drew her; and her friendship and admiration for Emma
Barton; and the off-chance. There might be a story for her. She ranged
the city, did Winnie Steppler, for her stuff. Her friends were firemen
and policemen, newsboys and elevator starters; movie ticket-sellers,
news-stand girls, hotel clerks, lunch-room waitresses, manicures,
taxi-drivers, street-sweepers, doormen, waiters, Greek boot-blacks--all
that vast stratum of submerged servers over whom the flood of humanity
sweeps in a careless torrent leaving no one knows what sediment of rich
knowledge.
At sight of Lottie, Winnie Steppler's Irish blue eyes blazed. She
affected a brogue, inimitable. "Och, but you're the grand sight and me
a-sickening for ye these weeks and not a glimpse. You'll have lunch
with me--you and Her Honour there."
"I can't," said Lottie.
"And why not, then!"
It really was beginning to sound a little foolish. Lottie hesitated.
She fidgeted with her fingers, looked up smiling uncertainly.
"I've"--with a rush--"I've got to be home by twelve to drive mother to
market and to the West Side."
"Telephone her. Say you won't be home till two. It's no life-and-death
matter, is it--the market and the West Side?"
Lottie tried to picture that driving force at home waiting complacently
until she should return at two. "Oh, I can't! I can't!"
Winnie Steppler, the world-wise, stared at her a moment curiously.
There had been a note resembling hysteria in Lottie's voice. "Why, look
here, girl----"
"Order in the court!" said Judge Barton, with mock dignity. But she
meant it. It was ten o'clock. Two probation officers came in. A bailiff
opened the door and stuck his head in. Judge Barton nodded to him. He
closed the door. You heard his voice in the outer room. "Jeannette
Kromek! Mrs. Kromek! Otto Kromek!"
A girl in a wrinkled blue cloth dress, a black velvet tam o'shanter,
slippers and (significant this) black cotton stockings. At sight of
those black cotton stockings Lottie Payson knew, definitely, that
beneath the top tawdriness of Jeannette was Jennie, sound enough. A
sullen, lowering, rather frightened girl of seventeen. Her hair was
bobbed. The style went oddly with the high-cheek-boned Slavic face, the
blunt-fingered factory hands. With her was a shawled woman who might
have been forty or sixty. She glanced about dartingly beneath lowered
lids with quick furtive looks. An animal, trapped, has the same look
in its eyes. The two stood at the side of the table facing Judge Barton.
"Where is Otto Kromek?"
"He didn't show up," the bailiff reported.
No case, then. But Judge Barton did not so state. She leaned forward a
little toward the girl whose face was blotched and swollen with weeping.
"What's the trouble, Jennie?"
Jennie set her jaw. She looked down, looked up again. The brown eyes
were still upon her, questioningly. "I----"
The shawled woman plucked at the girl's skirt and whispered fiercely in
her own tongue.
"Le' me alone," hissed the girl, and jerked away.
Judge Barton turned toward the woman. "Mrs. Kromek, just stand away
from Jennie. Let her talk to me. Afterward you can talk."
The two separated, glaring.
"Now then, Jennie, how did it all happen?"
The girl begins to speak. The older woman edges closer again to catch
what the low voice says.
"We went ridin' with a couple fellas."
"Did you know them? Were they boys you knew?"
"No."
"How did you happen to go riding with them, Jennie?"
"We was walkin'----"
"We?"
"Me an' my girl friend. We was walkin'. These fellas was driving 'round
slow. We seen 'em. An' they come up to the curb where we was passin' by
an' asked us would we like to take a ride. Well, we didn't have nothin'
else to do so----"
I-sez-to-him and he-sez-to-me. The drive. Terror. A fight in the car,
the sturdy girls defending themselves fiercely. Home safe but so late
that the usual tirade became abuse. They had said things at home ...
well ... she'd show'm. She'd run away. She had taken the hundred to
spite him--Otto.
"Why did you go, Jennie? You knew, didn't you?"
The girl's smouldering resentment flared into open hatred. "It's her.
She's always a-yellin' at me. They're all yellin' all the time. I come
home from work and right away they jump on me. Nothin' I do ain't
right. I'm good and sick of it, that's what. Good and sick----" She
was weeping again, wildly, unrestrainedly. The older woman broke into
a torrent of talk in her own thick tongue. She grasped the girl's arm.
Jennie wrenched herself free. "Yeh, you!" She turned again to Judge
Barton, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She made no attempt to
wipe them away. The Jennies of Judge Barton's court, so prone to
tears, were usually poorly equipped for the disposal of them.
Emma Barton did not say, "Don't cry, Jennie." Without taking her eyes
from the girl she opened the upper right-hand drawer of her desk, and
from a neatly stacked pile of plain white handkerchiefs she took the
topmost one, shook it out of its folds and handed it wordlessly to
Jennie. As wordlessly Jennie took it and wiped her streaming eyes and
blew her nose, and mopped her face. Emma Barton had won a thousand
Jennies with a thousand neat white handkerchiefs extracted in the nick
of time from that upper right-hand drawer.
"Now then, Mrs. Kromek. What's the trouble between you and Jennie? Why
don't you get along, you two?"
Mrs. Kromek, no longer furtive, squared herself to state her grievance.
Hers was a polyglot but pungent tongue. She made plain her meaning.
Jennie was a bum, a no-good, a stuck-up. The house wasn't clean enough
for Jennie. Always she was washing. Evenings she was washing herself
always with hot water it was enough to make you sick. And Jennie was
sassy on the boarders.
And, "I see," said Judge Barton encouragingly, at intervals, as the
vituperative flood rolled on. "I see." Jennie's eyes, round with
hostility, glared at her accuser over the top of the handkerchief.
Finally, when the poison stream grew thinner, trickled, showed signs
of stopping altogether, Judge Barton beamed understandingly upon the
vixenish Mrs. Kromek. "I understand perfectly now. Just wait here,
Mrs. Kromek. Jennie, come with me." She beckoned to Lottie. The three
disappeared into the inner office. Judge Barton laid a hand lightly on
the girl's shoulder. "Now then, Jennie, what would you like to do, h'm?
Just talk to me. Tell me, what would you like to do?"
Jennie's hands writhed in the folds of her skirt. She twisted her
fingers. She sobbed final dry, racking sobs. And then she rolled the
judicial handkerchief into a tight, damp, hard little ball and began to
talk. She talked as she had never talked to Ma Kromek. Translated, it
ran thus:
At home there was no privacy. The house was full of hulking men;
pipe-smoke; the smell of food eternally stewing on the stove; shrill
or guttural voices; rough jests. Book-reading, bathing, reticence on
Jennie's part were all shouted down as attempts at being "toney." When
she came home from the factory at night, tired, nerve-worn, jaded, the
house was as cluttered and dirty as it had been when she left it in the
morning. The mother went with the boarders (this Jennie told as evenly
and dispassionately as the rest). She had run away from home after
the last hideous family fracas. She had taken the money in a spirit
of hatred and revenge. She'd do it again. If they had let her go to
school, as she had wanted to--she used to talk English all right, like
the teacher--but you heard the other kind of talk around the house and
at the factory and pretty soon you couldn't talk the right way. They
made fun of you if you did. A business college course. That was what
she wanted. She could spell. At school she could spell better than
anyone in the room. Only they had taken her out in the sixth grade.
What to do with Jennie?
The two older women looked at each other over Jennie's head. The
course in stenography could be managed simply enough. Judge Barton met
such problems hourly. But what to do with Jennie in the meantime? She
shrank from consigning to a detention home or a Girls' Refuge this
fundamentally sound and decent young creature.
Suddenly, "I'll take her," said Lottie.
"How do you mean?"
"I'll take her home with me. We've got rooms and rooms in that barracks
of ours. The whole third floor. She can stay for awhile. Anyway, she
can't go back to that house."
The girl sat looking from one to the other, uncomprehending. Her hands
were clutching each other tightly. Emma Barton turned to her. "What do
you say, Jennie? Would you like to go home with Miss Payson here? Just
for awhile, until we think of something else? I think we can manage the
business college course."
The girl seemed hardly to comprehend. Lottie leaned toward her. "Would
you like to come to my house, Jeannette?" And at that the first stab of
misgiving darted through Lottie. "My house?" She thought of her mother.
"Yes," answered Jennie with the ready acquiescence of her class. "Yes."
And so it was settled, simply. Ma Kromek accepted the decision with
dumb passiveness. One of the brothers would bring Jennie's clothes to
the Prairie Avenue house. Jennie had only spent half of the stolen
hundred. The unspent half she had returned to him. The rest she would
pay back, bit by bit, out of her earnings. Winnie Steppler bemoaned her
inability to make a feature story of Jennie--Jeannette. Lottie smiled
at Jennie, and propelled her down the corridor and into the elevator,
to the street. In her well-fitting tailor suit, and her good furs
and her close little velvet hat, she looked the Lady Bountiful. The
girl, shabby, tear-stained, followed. Lottie was racked with horrid
misgivings. Why had she suggested it! What a mad idea! Her mother! She
tried to put the thought out of her mind. She couldn't face it. And
all the while she was unlocking the door of the electric, settling
herself in the seat, holding out a hand to help Jennie's entrance. The
watery sunshine of the early morning had been a false promise. It was
raining again.
Out of the welter of State Street and Wabash, and into the clear
stretch of Michigan once more she turned suddenly to look at Jennie
and found Jennie looking fixedly at her. Jennie's eyes did not drop
shiftily at this unexpected encounter. That was reassuring.
"Gussie works at my sister's," she told the girl, bluntly. "That's how
I happened to be in court this morning when your case came up."
"Oh," said Jennie, accepting this as of a piece with all the rest of
the day's happenings. Then, after a moment, "Is that why you said you'd
take me? Gussie?"
"No, I didn't even think of Gussie at the time. I just thought of you.
I didn't even think of myself." She smiled a little grimly. "I'm going
to call you Jeannette, shall I?"
"Yeh. Jennie's so homely. What's your name?"
"Lottie."
Jeannette politely made no comment. Lottie found herself defending the
name. "It's short for Charlotte, you know. My Aunt Charlotte lives
with us. We'd get mixed up. My niece is named Charlotte, too. We call
her Charley."
Jeannette nodded briskly. "I know. I seen her once. I was at Gussie's.
Gussie told me. She's awful pretty.... She's got it swell.... You like
my hair this way?" She whisked off the dusty velvet tam.
"I think I'd like it better the other way. Long."
"I'll let it grow. I can do it in a net so it looks like long." They
rode along in silence.
What to say to her mother! She glanced at her watch. Eleven. Well, at
least she wasn't late. They were turning into Prairie at Sixteenth. She
was terrified at what she had done; furious that this should be so. She
argued fiercely with herself, maintaining all the while her outwardly
composed and dignified demeanour. "Don't be a silly fool. You're a
woman of thirty-two--almost thirty-three. You ought to be at the head
of your own household. If you were, this is what you'd have done. Well,
then!" But she was sick with apprehension, even while she despised
herself because it was so.
Jeannette was speaking again. "The houses around here are swell, ain't
they?"
"Yes," Lottie agreed, absently. Her own house was a block away.
Jeannette's mind grasshoppered to another topic. "I can talk good if
you keep telling me. I forget. Home and in the works everybody talks
bum English. I learn quick."
"Well, then," said Lottie. "I shouldn't say 'swell' nor 'ain't'."
Jeannette thought a moment.
"The--houses--around--here--are--grand--are--they--not?"
Suddenly Lottie reached over and covered the girl's hand with her own.
Jeannette smiled back at her. She thought her a fine looking
middle-aged person. Not a very swell dresser but you could see she had
class.
"Here we are!" said Lottie aloud. The direct, clear-headed woman
who had acted with authority and initiative only an hour before in
the court room was now thinking, "Oh, dear! Oh, _dear_!" in
anticipative agony. She stepped out of the electric. "Gussie'll be
glad."
"Yeh--Gussie!" Jeannette's tone was not without venom. "She's her own
boss. She's got it good. Sometimes for a whole month she didn't come
home." She stared curiously at the grim old Prairie Avenue house. It
was raining hard now. Lottie glanced quickly up at the parlour window.
Sometimes her mother stood there, watching for her, impatient of any
waiting. She was not there now. She opened the front door, the two
entered--Jeannette the braver of the two.
"Yoo-hoo!" called Lottie with an airy assumption of cheeriness.
Jeannette stood looking up and down the long dim hallway with wide
ambient eyes. There was no answer to Lottie's call. She sped back to
the kitchen.
"Where's mother?"
"She ban gone out."
"Out! Where? It's raining. Pouring!"
"She ban gone out."
Even in her horror at the thought of her rheumatism-stricken mother
in the downpour she was conscious of a feeling of relief. It was the
relief a condemned murderer feels whose hanging is postponed from
to-day until to-morrow.
She came back to Jeannette. Oh, _dear_! "Come upstairs with me,
Jeannette." Lottie ran up the stairs quickly, Jeannette at her heels.
She went straight to Aunt Charlotte's room. Aunt Charlotte was asleep
in her old plush armchair by the window. She often napped like that in
the morning. She dropped off to sleep easily, sometimes dozing almost
immediately after breakfast. It was light, fitful sleep. She started
up, wide awake, as Lottie came in.
"Where's mother?"
Aunt Charlotte smiled grimly. "She bounced out the minute you left."
"But where?"
"Her rents and the marketing."
"But it's raining. She can't be out in the rain. Way over there!"
"She said she was going to take the street car.... What time is it,
Lottie? I must have.... Who's that in the hall?" She stopped in the
middle of a yawn.
"Jeannette, come here. This is Jeannette, Aunt Charlotte. Gussie's
sister. You know--Gussie who works for Belle. I've brought Jeannette
home with me."
"That's nice," said Aunt Charlotte, pleasantly.
"To live, I mean."
"Oh! Does your mother know?"
"No. I just--I just brought her home." Lottie put a hand on Aunt
Charlotte's withered cheek. She was terribly near to tears. "Dear
Aunt Charlotte, won't you take care of Jeannette; I'm going out after
mother. Show her her room--upstairs; you know. And give her some hot
lunch. On the third floor you know--the room."
Jeannette spoke up, primly. "I don't want to make nobody trouble."
"Trouble!" echoed Aunt Charlotte. She rose spryly to her feet, asked no
explanation. "You come with me, Jeannette. My, my! How pretty your hair
is cut short like that. So Gussie is your sister, h'm? Well, well." She
actually pinched Jeannette's tear-stained cheek.
"The dear thing!" Lottie thought, harassed as she was. "The darling old
thing!" And then, suddenly: "_She_ should have been my mother."
Lottie ran downstairs and into the electric. She jerked its levers so
that the old vehicle swayed and cavorted on the slippery pavement.
She would drive straight over to the one-story buildings on west
Halsted, near Eighteenth. Her mother usually went there first. It was
a Polish settlement. Mrs. Payson owned a row of six stores occupied
by a tobacconist, a shoemaker, a delicatessen, a Chinese laundry, a
grocer, a lunch room. She collected the rents herself, let out bids for
repairs, kept her own books. Lottie had tried to help with these last
but she was not good at accounts. Unless carefully watched she mixed
things up hopelessly. Mrs. Payson juggled account books, ledgers, check
books, rental lists like an expert accountant. Eighteenth Street, as
Lottie drove across it now, was a wallow of liquid mud, rain, drays,
spattered yellow street-cars, dim drab-looking shops. The slippery
car tracks were a menace to drivers. She had to go slowly. The row of
Halsted Street buildings reached at last, Lottie ran in one store and
out the other.
"Is my mother here?"
"She's gone."
"Has Mrs. Payson been here?"
"Long. She left an hour ago."
There were the other buildings on Forty-third Street. But she couldn't
have gone way up there, Lottie told herself. But she decided to try
them. On the way she stopped at the house. Her mother had not yet
come in. She went on up to Forty-third, the spring rain lashing the
glassed-in hood of the electric. Yes, her mother had been there and
gone. Lottie was conscious of a little hot flame of anger rising,
rising in her. It seemed to drum in her ears. It made her eyelids smart
and sting. She set her teeth. She swung the car over to Gus's market on
Forty-third. Her hands gripped the levers so that the ungloved knuckles
showed white.
"It's a damned shame, that's what it is!" she said, aloud; and sobbed a
little. "It's a damned shame, that's what it is. She could have waited.
It's just pure meanness. She could have waited. I wish I was dead!"
It was as though the calm, capable, resourceful woman of the ten
o'clock court room scene had never been.
"Gus, has my mother----?"
"She's just went. You can ketch her yet. I told her to wait till it let
up a little. She was wetter'n a drowned rat. But not her! You know your
ma! Wait nothin'."
Lottie headed toward Indiana Avenue and the car line. Her eyes
searched the passers-by beneath their dripping umbrellas. Then she
spied her, a draggled black-garbed figure, bundle laden, waiting on the
corner for her car. Her left arm--the bad one--was held stiffly folded
in front of her, close to her body. That meant pain. Her shoulders were
hunched a little. Her black hat was slightly askew. Lottie noted, with
the queer faculty one has for detail at such times, that her colour
was slightly yellow. But as she peered up the street in vain hope
of an approaching street car, her glance was as alert as ever. She
walked forward toward the curb to scan the empty car tracks. Lottie
noticed her feet. In the way she set them down; in their appearance of
ankle-weakness and a certain indescribable stiffness that carried with
it a pathetic effort at spryness there was, somehow, a startling effect
of age, of feebleness. She toed in a little with weariness. A hot blur
sprang to Lottie's eyes. She drew up sharply at the curb, flung open
the door, was out, had seized the bundles and was propelling her mother
toward the electric almost before Mrs. Payson had realised her presence.
"Mother dear, why didn't you wait!"
For a moment it looked as if Mrs. Payson meant to resist stubbornly.
She even jerked her arm away, childishly. But strong as her will was,
her aching body protested still more strongly. Lottie hoisted her
almost bodily into the electric. She looked shrunken and ocherous as
she huddled in a corner. But her face was set, implacable. The car sped
down the rain-swept street. Lottie glanced sideways at her mother. Her
eyes were closed. They seemed strangely deep-set in their sockets.
"Oh, mama----" Lottie's voice broke; the tears, hot, hurt, repentant,
coursed down her cheeks--"why did you do it! You knew--you knew----"
Mrs. Carrie Payson opened her eyes. "You said Belle's hired girl's
sister was more important than I, didn't you? Well!"
"But you knew I didn't----" she stopped short. She couldn't say she
hadn't meant it. She had. She couldn't explain to her mother that she
had meant that her effort to help Jeannette was her protest against
stifled expression. Her mother would not have understood. It sounded
silly and pretentious even in her unspoken thought. But deeper than
this deprecatory self-consciousness was a new and growing consciousness
of Self.
She remembered Jeannette; Jeannette installed in the third floor room,
a member of the household. At the thought of breaking the news of her
presence to her mother Lottie felt a wild desire to giggle. It was a
task too colossal, too hopeless for seriousness. You had to tackle it
smilingly or go down to defeat at once. Lottie braced herself for the
effort. She told herself, dramatically, that if Jeannette went she,
too, would go.
"I brought Jeannette home with me."
"Who?"
"Jeannette--Gussie's sister. The one who's had trouble with the family."
"Home! What for!"
"She's--she's a nice little thing, and bright. There wasn't any place
to send her. We've got so much room."
"You must be crazy."
"Are you going to turn her out into the storm, mom, like the girl in
the melodrama?"
Mrs. Payson was silent a moment. Then, "Does she know anything about
housework? Belle's always saying her Gussie's such a treasure. I'm
about sick of that Hulda. Wastes more every week than we eat. I don't
see what they _do_ with it--these girls. If we used a pound of
butter this last week we used five and I hardly touch----"
"Jeannette doesn't want to do housework. She wants to go to business
college."
"Well, of course, if you're running a reform school."
But she made no further protest now. Lottie, peeling off her mother's
wet clothing as soon as they entered the house, pleaded with her to go
to bed.
She was startled when her mother agreed. Mrs. Payson had always said,
"When I go to bed in the middle of the day you can know I'm sick." Now
she crept stiffly between the covers of her big old-fashioned walnut
bed with a groan that she tried to turn into a cough. An hour later
they sent for the doctor. An acute arthritis attack. Lottie reproached
herself grimly, unsparingly.
"I'll get up around four o'clock," Mrs. Payson said. "You don't find
me staying in bed. Belle does enough of that for the whole family." At
four she said, "I'll get up in time for dinner.... Where's that girl?
Where's that girl that was so important, h'm? I want to see her."
She was in bed for a week. Lottie covered herself with reproaches.