“You’ve been gone a long time, Lena,” said the mother in a delicately querulous voice. “You’re fortunate to be able to get out instead of being cooped up in this little room the way I am.” Mrs. Quincy coughed with conscious pathos. “I sometimes wonder if you ever think of your poor mother and how lonely she is most of the time. But I’d ought to be used to people’s always forgetting me.”
“Much I have to come home to!” Lena answered. “You’re about as cheerful as barbed wire. But you can comfort yourself! I shan’t be able to go out at all much longer, any way.”
“Why, what’s the matter now?”
“Do you expect me to wear a felt hat all summer?” Lena asked sharply. “I’m ashamed to be seen in that old thing and I should think you’d be ashamed to be so stingy with me.”
Her mother sighed and lapsed into the creaking comfort of her rocking-chair.
“I ain’t stingy,” she said at last. “But if you had your way you’d spend every last cent of the pension the very day it comes. I’ve got to look out we don’t starve. If you’d only make up your mind to work and earn a little instead of livin’ so pinched! I’m sure I’d work if I could. But there! there ain’t nothing for me to do but to set and suffer, and nobody knows what I endure.”
“I wasn’t born to be a working girl,” said Lena sullenly. “I’ve got the blood of a lady if I haven’t got the clothes of one.”
“Well, when it comes to eating and drinking, blood don’t count much. Everybody’s got the same appetite.”
“No, everybody hasn’t,” retorted the girl. “I haven’t any appetite for canned baked-beans and liver.”
“You eat them, anyway.”