“Take? Aw, dry up, kid! You ain’t taking nothing,” she protested, embarrassed. “Tear off some sleep and forget it.”
“I’ll get close to the wall and make room for you,” I murmured as I dropped off to sleep.
When I woke up I found, to my surprise, the woman was sleeping in a chair with a shawl wrapped around her like a huge statue. The half of the bed which she had left for me had remained untouched.
“You were sleeping so sound I didn’t want to wake you,” she said as she hurried to prepare the breakfast.
I rose, refreshed, restored—sane. It was more than gratitude that rushed out of my heart to her. I felt I belonged to someone, I had found home at last.
As I was ready to leave for work I turned to her. “I am coming back to-night,” I said.
She fell back of a sudden as though I had struck her. From the quick pain that shone in her face I knew I had hurt something deep within her. Her eyes met mine in a fixed gaze but she did not see me, but stared through me into the vacancy of space. She seemed to have forgotten my presence, and when she spoke her voice was like that of one in a trance. “You don’t know what you’re asking. I—ain’t—no good.”
“You no good? God from the world! Where would I have been without you? Even my own sister shut me out. Of them all, you alone opened the door and spread for me all you had.”
“I ain’t so stuck on myself as the good people, although I was as good as any of them at the start. But the first time I got into trouble, instead of helping me, they gave me the marble stare and the frozen heart and drove me to the bad.”
I looked closely at her, at the dyed hair, the rouged lips, the defiant look of the woman driven by the Pharisees from the steps of the temple. Then I saw beneath. It was as though her body dropped away from her and there stood revealed her soul—the sorrows that gave her understanding—the shame and the heartbreak that she turned into love.