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Then they were off, in a little flurry of words and laughter. From force of habit Rose’s near-sighted eyes peered critically at the hang of Floss’s blue skirt and the angle of the pert new hat. She stood a moment, uncertainly, after they had left. On her face was the queerest look, as of one thinking, re-adjusting, struggling to arrive at a conclusion in the midst of sudden bewilderment. She turned mechanically and went into her mother’s room. She picked up the tray on the table by the bed.

“Who was that?” asked the sick woman, in her ghostly, devitalised voice.

“That was Henry Selz,” said Rose.

The sick woman grappled a moment with memory. “Henry Selz! Henry–oh, yes. Did he go out with Rose?”

“Yes,” said Rose.

“It’s cold in here,” whined the sick woman.

“I’ll get you a hot bag in a minute, Ma.” Rose carried the tray down the hall to the kitchen. At that Al emerged from his bedroom, shrugging himself into his coat. He followed Rose down the hall and watched her as she filled the bag and screwed it and wiped it dry.

“I’ll take that in to Ma,” he volunteered. He was up the hall and back in a flash. Rose had slumped into a chair at the dining-room table, and was pouring herself a cup of cold and bitter tea. Al came over to her and laid one white hand on her shoulder.

“Ro, lend me a couple of dollars till Saturday, will you?”

“I should say not.”

Al doused his cigarette in the dregs of a convenient teacup. He bent down and laid his powdered and pale cheek against Rose’s sallow one. One arm was about her, and his hand patted her shoulder.

“Oh, come on, kid,” he coaxed. “Don’t I always pay you back? Come on! Be a sweet ol’ sis. I wouldn’t ask you only I’ve got a date to go to the White City to-night, and dance, and I couldn’t get out of it. I tried.” He kissed her, and his lips were moist, and he reeked of tobacco, and though Rose shrugged impatiently away from him he knew that he had won. Rose was not an eloquent woman; she was not even an articulate one, at times. If she had been, she would have lifted up her voice to say now:

“Oh, God! I am a woman! Why have you given me all the sorrows, and the drudgery, and the bitterness and the thanklessness of motherhood, with none of its joys! Give me back my youth! I’ll drink the dregs at the bottom of the cup, but first let me taste the sweet!”

But Rose did not talk or think in such terms. She could not have put into words the thing she was feeling even if she had been able to diagnose it. So what she said was, “Don’t you think I ever get sick and tired of slaving for a thankless bunch like you? Well, I do! Sick and tired of it. That’s what! You make me tired, coming around asking for money, as if I was a bank.”

But Al waited. And presently she said, grudgingly, wearily, “There’s a dollar bill and some small change in the can on the second shelf in the china closet.”

Al was off like a terrier. From the pantry came the clink of metal against metal. He was up the hall in a flash, without a look at Rose. The front door slammed a third time.

Rose stirred her cold tea slowly, leaning on the table’s edge and gazing down into the amber liquid that she did not mean to drink. For suddenly and comically her face puckered up like a child’s. Her head came down among the supper things with a little crash that set the teacups, and the greasy plates to jingling, and she sobbed as she lay there, with great tearing, ugly sobs that would not be stilled, though she tried to stifle them as does one who lives in a paper-thin Chicago flat. She was not weeping for the Henry Selz whom she had just seen. She was not weeping for envy of her selfish little sister, or for loneliness, or weariness. She was weeping at the loss of a ghost who had become her familiar. She was weeping because a packet of soiled and yellow old letters on the top shelf in the hall closet was now only a packet of soiled and yellow old letters, food for the ash can. She was weeping because the urge of spring, that had expressed itself in her only this morning pitifully enough in terms of rhubarb, and housecleaning and a bundle of thumbed old love letters, had stirred in her for the last time.

But presently she did stop her sobbing and got up and cleared the table, and washed the dishes and even glanced at the crumpled sheets of the morning paper that she never found time to read until evening. By eight o’clock the little flat was very still.