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She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered over his glasses at her. “Who is it?” Tessie had not known, somehow, that his face was so kindly.

Tessie’s carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. “It’s me!” she whimpered. “It’s me!”

He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside.

“Angie! Angie! Here’s a poor little kid—-“

Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She tried to straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story she had planned to tell?

“Who is it, Dad? Who—-?” Angie Hatton came into the hallway. She stared at Tessie. Then: “Why, my dear!” she said. “My dear! Come in here.”

Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in Angie Hatton’s expensive shoulder. Tessie remembered later that she had felt no surprise at the act.

“There, there!” Angie Hatton was saying. “Just poke up the fire, Dad. And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don’t know. To drink, you know. Something—-“

Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped her eyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trapped little animal. She put a hand to her tousled head.

“That’s all right,” Angie Hatton assured her. “You can fix it after a while.”

There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tear-stained young ladies at dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They evinced no curiosity about this disheveled creature who had flung herself in upon their decent solitude.

Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton’s face and opened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flashed a quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked–well, Tessie put it to herself, thus: “She looks like she’d cried till she couldn’t cry no mo
re–only inside.”

And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. “I wouldn’t never have gone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys’re gone. It’s fierce. You get scared, sitting home, waiting, and they’re in France and everywhere, learning French and everything, and meeting grand people and having a fuss made over ’em. So I got mad and said I didn’t care, I wasn’t going to squat home all my life, waiting—-“

Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking down at her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions and thoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. These things which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she now was laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked no questions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interrupted with: “So that’s the kind of fellow they’ve got as escapement-room foreman, eh?”

Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. “Say, it wasn’t his fault. He’s a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn’t I? It was me. I didn’t care. Seemed to me it didn’t make no difference who I went with, but it does.” She looked down at her hands clasped so tightly in her lap.

“Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference,” Angie agreed, and looked up at her father.

At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: “He’s learning all kind of new things. Me, I ain’t learning anything. When Chuck comes home he’ll just think I’m dumb, that’s all. He—-“

“What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuck comes home—-“