“I hope you’re not hurt.”
“Not in the least. Only humiliated.” Lena smiled, because people are always attracted by cheerfulness.
“You are sure you have not twisted your ankle?” he insisted.
“Nothing but my hat and my hair,” she pouted. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”
“It wasn’t much of a rescue,” he said.
“Are you sorry I didn’t have a tragedy and give you a chance to play hero?” she inquired naïvely.
“When you are in need, may I be the one to help?” he said with growing boldness.
Lena flushed and nodded as he lifted his hat and was gone. She walked slowly homeward, actually forgetting to stop at her favorite window in the lace store, so occupied was she with the latest story she was telling herself. It was a story in which a large house with soft rugs and becoming pink lights occupied the foreground, and somewhere in the background hovered a man who was a type and who loved to spend money on diamonds. The vision was so lovable that she lived with it all the way, even through the narrow entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow stairs, saturated with obsolete smells—smells of dead dinners—to the very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of which the word “shabby” was written in a handwriting as plain, and in language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon. It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ. Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness hidden in the depths.
Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now looked like wrinkled cream.
Lena shut the door and came in without speaking. She flung her hat and coat on the bed in the corner, where a forlorn counterpane showed by the hollows and hills beneath that it had given up all attempt to play even. The girl sat down listlessly with her hands in her lap.