“Yesterday. I must go back, please. I only came to tell you.”
“But why?”
“Well, ma’am. She’s lying on the table and I have to watch her.”
“Watch her?”
“Yes. Because when father comes home drunk, he knocks her off, and I have to put her on again.”
This narration startled even the bridge-players, and there were protests of horror. But the philosophic wanderer, who had never been the same woman since Russian influenza, smiled placidly.
“I knew something really much more awful than that,” she said. “A young woman, well-known to me, had charge of a crèche of thirty infants, and one day she took it into her head to amuse herself by changing all their clothes, so that at night they could not be identified; and many of them never were identified! She was such a merry girl! I knew all her brothers and sisters too! She wanted to go into a sisterhood, and she did, for a month. But the only thing she did there—well, one day she went down into the laundry and taught all the laundry-maids to polka. She was such a merry girl!”
She smiled with extraordinary simplicity.
“In the end,” the bland wanderer continued, after a little pause, “she went to America. America is such an odd place! Once I got into a car at Philadelphia that had come from New York. The conductor showed me my berth. The bed was warm. I partly undressed and got into it, and drew the curtain. I was half asleep, when I felt a hand feeling me over through the curtain. I called out, and a man’s voice said: ‘It’s all right. I’m only looking for my stick. I think I must have left it in the berth’! Another time a lot of student girls were in the same car with me. They all got into their beds—or berths or whatever you call it—about eight o’clock, wearing fancy jackets, and they sat up and ate candy. I was walking up and down, and every time I passed they implored me to have candy, and then they implored each other to try to persuade me. They were mostly named Sadie. At one in the morning they ordered iced drinks ‘round. I was obliged to drink with them. They tired me out, and then made me drink. I don’t know what happened just after that, but I know that, at five in the morning, they were all sitting up and eating candy. I’ve travelled a good deal in America and it’s such an odd place! It was just the place for that young woman to go to.”