FullReads

“Why, Miss Joy,” she exclaimed, “you look as if your father had lost every cint he had in the world.”

The girl flushed uneasily, but her eyes did not fall from the old woman’s.

“Everybody knows that, Martha. Where have you been?”

“Stone deaf,” said Martha, “among me own sorrows. But you’re all in black.”

“I lost my father, too.”

Old Martha made a soft, crooning sound of pity.

“So,” and Miss Joy tried to speak bravely. “I live all alone now, and–“

“Have ye no money?”

“Not a penny, Martha. I had a job as a reporter until they asked me to do things that I wouldn’t do.”

“And when did you lose this job?”

“Day before yesterday.”

“And now?”

“Oh, something will turn up.”

“Meaning that nothing has.”

“Not yet.” She was beginning to shiver with the cold. “Good-by, Martha, it’s good to see you again, and I could stand here talking till all hours if it wasn’t for the wind.”

She had given both her hands to Martha, but this one would not let them go. Her fine, gentle, old face became set and obstinate.

“When did you eat last?”

The girl smiled wanly and shivered.

She felt her arm being drawn through Martha’s. She felt herself pulled rapidly toward the avenue.

Martha, satisfied with the face of a passing taxicab’s driver, whistled with sudden, piercing shrillness.

“Where are you taking me?”

Old Martha’s eyes became humorous. It was pleasant to her to play fairy godmother to a millionaire’s daughter.

“To me suite in the St. Savior,” said she. “To a hot tub, dearie, and a hot dinner, and a warm bed.”

In Martha’s sitting-room were flowers. She could afford them. On the bureau in her bedroom was a large photograph of the Poor Boy, in an eighteen-carat gold frame, very plain and smart.

While Martha was undoing the hooks of her dress Miss Joy stood in front of the bureau and looked at this photograph.

“Poor Boy,” she said presently.

“What’s that?” said Martha.

“What’s become of him, Martha?”

Martha told her.

“It was all so wicked,” said the girl.

“Wicked,” said Martha, “was no name for it. All his friends to believe he’d do a thing like that! I could skin them alive, the lot of them!”

“I was one of his friends, Martha.”

“I make no war on women,” said Martha.

“I say I was one of his friends–but I never believed he did it–I mean how could he, and why should he?”

“Perhaps you wrote to tell him you believed in him!”

“I wish I had,” said the girl, “but I thought everybody would, and then you know we had a sort of a misunderstanding; and I was going to, and then my father’s troubles got so bad that he couldn’t hide them from me, and we used to talk them over all night sometimes, and I couldn’t think about anybody else’s troubles.–Is he up there all alone?”

“There’s the last hook. And now I’ll draw a tub.”

Miss Joy undressed herself to the music of water roaring under high pressure into a deep porcelain tub. She was no longer hungry, for she had had a glass of milk on arriving at the hotel, but she was very tired and a little dizzy in her head.

As is the custom with girls who have been brought up with maids to dress and undress them, she flung her clothes upon a chair in a disorderly heap, and was no more embarrassed at being naked before Martha than if Martha had been a piece of furniture.

“Come and talk to me, Martha,” she said, “while I soak.”

So Martha sat by the tub as by a bedside, and Miss Joy with a sigh of comfort lay at length in the hot water and they talked.

“Is he up there all alone?”

“He is now. The housework was too heavy for one old woman. He sent me to New York to find a helper. But the wages don’t make up for the loneliness in the young biddy’s mind–in what she is plazed to call her mind–and I’m five days lookin’ about and nothing done.”