How sweet of Mattie Farnham to give her that striped velours to cover it with. She never could have afforded anything so fine. What lovely, lovely stuff it was! How she loved beautiful fabrics. Her face softened to dreaminess as she passed her hand gently over the smoothly drawn material and thought with affection of the donor. What a good-hearted girl Mattie was.
Her children would not have recognized her face as she sat there loving the sofa and the rich fabric on it and thinking gratefully of her friend.
But how funny Mattie was about dressing herself! Was there anybody who had less faculty for it? A flicker of amusement—the first she had felt all day—drew her lips into a good-natured smile at the recollection of that awful hat with the pink feather which Mattie had wanted to buy. What a figure of fun she had looked in it! And she knew it! And yet was hypnotized by the dowdy thing. All she had needed was the hint to take the small, dark-blue one that suited her perfectly. How queer she couldn’t think of it herself.
She loved to go shopping with Mattie—with old Mrs. Anderson, with any of the ladies in the Guild who so often asked her advice. It was a real pleasure to help them select the right things. But—her softened face tightened and set—how horribly naughty Stephen was when you tried to take him into shops. Such disgraceful scenes as she had had with him when he got tired and impatient.
The clock behind her struck half-past nine, and she became aware of its ticking once more, its insistent whisper: “So much to do! So much to do! So much to do!”
She was very tired and found she had relaxed wearily into her chair. But she got up with a brisk energetic motion like a prizefighter coming out of his corner. She detested people who moved languidly and dragged themselves around.
She went into the kitchen and put the oatmeal into the fireless cooker, and after this waited, polishing absentmindedly the nickel towel-bar of the shining stove, till she heard Lester go out of the bathroom.
Then she went swiftly up the stairs, locked the bathroom door behind her, and began to unwind the bandages from around her upper arm. When it finally came off she inspected the raw patch on her arm. It was crusted over in places, with thick, yellowish-white pus oozing from the pustules. It was spreading. It was worse. It would never be any better. It was like everything else.
She spread a salve on it with practised fingers, wound a fresh bandage about her arm, fastened it firmly and then washed her hands over and over, scrubbing them mercilessly with a stiff brush till they were raw. She always felt unclean to her bones after she had seen one of those frequently recurring eczema eruptions on her skin. She never spoke of them unless someone asked her a question about her health. She felt disgraced by their loathsomeness, although no one but she and the doctor ever saw them. She often called it to herself, “the last straw.”
Her nightgown hung on the bathroom door. They usually dressed and undressed here not to disturb Stephen who still slept in their bedroom, because there was no other corner in the little house for him. And now they would never be able to move to a larger house where they could live decently and have a room apiece, to a better part of town where the children would have decent playmates. Never anything but this. …
She began to undress rapidly and to wash. As she combed her dark hair, she noticed again how rapidly it was falling. The comb was full of long hairs. She took them out and rolled them up into a coil. She supposed she ought to save her combings to make a switch against the inevitable time when her hair would be too thin to do up. And she had had such beautiful hair! It had been her one physical superiority, that and her “style.” What good had they ever done her!
She began to think of the frightening moment in the kitchen that evening, when for an instant she had lost her bitterly fought-for self-control, when the taut cable of her willpower had snapped under the strain put upon it. For a wild instant she had been all one inner clamor to die, to die, to lay down the heavy, heavy burden, too great for her to bear. What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming out. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another, full of drudgery. No rest from the constant friction over the children’s carelessness and forgetfulness and childishness! How she hated childishness! And she must try to endure it patiently or at least with the appearance of patience. Sometimes, in black moments like this, it seemed to her that she had such strange children, not like other people’s, easy to understand and manage, strong, normal children. Helen … there didn’t seem to be anything to Helen! With the exasperation which passivity always aroused in her, Helen’s mother thought of the dumb vacant look on Helen’s face that evening when she had tried to show her how to perform a simple operation a little less clumsily. Sometimes it seemed as though Helen were not all there! And Henry with that nervous habit of questioning everything
