"There ain't no call to talk that way to me. I don't want no cheerin' up. The time's past for that. I fought it all out here alone and now I got my plan ready. I didn't send for no one to tell me I ain't goin' to die, because I know I am. If it wasn't for Jimmie I'd be glad, laughin' glad to go. It's him I'm goin' to tell you about."
For a while she seemed to forget Jean altogether and then she began again, in a flat, even voice, choosing only the thread of her story, as if she were used to husbanding her small strength.
"Did you ever live in a room like this? Get up in the mornin' in it and go to bed at night in it, and sit all the evenin' in it, so that your thoughts soak into it and you can feel them rush out at you the minute you open the door? You can never get away. And there don't seem to be nothing in the whole wide world but yourself. It's a terrible thing.
"I used to lay in bed at night and feel myself shut up in my cell, and then I got to thinkin' about all the other people in the world shut up in their cells and none of us could get out or talk through to one another, millions of us locked up tight.
"Hundreds of times I said to myself, 'If that's all there is to it, why go on?' But I could never come round to the picture of killing myself. Once I tried but I didn't get very far. And then I begun wonderin' why it was that I didn't do the job straight through; wonderin' and wonderin', until one night, like an earthquake, it hit me sudden. It was all the people behind me, clear back to Adam and Eve, holdin' me here, all the men and women that had loved each other and hated each other and had children and kept things going. And if I killed myself—it would be like takin' one of the girl's jobs in the factory to finish so she could draw her pay and then not doin' it.
"Mebbe you won't understand, but you'll have to take it the way I say, for I saw it as clear as I see you in that chair. We was put here to keep things goin'. And I was goin' to stop 'em. There wouldn't be any me after I was dead and all them people back of me was goin' to drop out of things, just like I had killed 'em. Did you ever think like that?"
Jean shook her head. Before the fire of loneliness that had seared this woman, she could not speak.
"We're all different, I guess. But I got so I couldn't bear the thought of dyin' and bein' ended, without ever havin' had nothin' and leavin' nothin' and so—I had a baby."
Jean felt as if the wind outside had torn its way into the room.
"You decided, made up your mind to have a baby, and had one?"