"You don't want to do that," she had said, taking all the pictures out again and setting them up in their places. She also would not allow the large ornamental piano-lamp, that took up half the stuffy little room, to be moved. It had cost thirty-two dollars. So it stood there in the dark-carpeted, obscure parlour, and its yellow silk shade with the grimy white silk roses pinned on it was an outrage to Nancy's pained gaze.
One evening at bed-time Anne-Marie said to her mother: "I like the girl next door."
"You do not know her, darling," said Nancy.
"Oh yes, I do. I talked to her from the back-window."
"What is her name?" said Nancy, unfastening strings and buttons on her daughter's back.
"Oh, she told me—I don't know. A little dry name like a cough."
Nancy laughed and kissed the nape of Anne-Marie's neck, which was plump, and fair, and sweet to smell. At that moment the girl-neighbour knocked and came in, with a bear made of chocolate for Anne-Marie. Her name—the dry name like a cough—was Peggy.
"I've just come in because I thought you seemed kind of lonesome," she said, looking round the parlour after Anne-Marie had been tucked in and left in the adjoining bedroom with the door ajar.
She then told Nancy that she worked in a hairdresser's shop down Broadway, "mostly fixing nails." "Sickening work," she added. "All those different hands I have to keep holding kind of turns me. Especially women's!"
Nancy laughed. Peggy offered to fix her nails for nothing, and after some hesitation Nancy allowed her to do so.