The child waited until the covers had again closed over her father, and then she started away. Minnie Henryson turned and watched her as she slipped across the avenue, avoiding the cars and the carts with the skill born of long experience.
At last Mrs. Henryson tore herself away from the window with its flamboyant head-gear. “No,” she said, emphatically, “I don’t believe really they’re going to be any smaller.”
The daughter did not answer. She was thinking of the little domestic episode she had just witnessed; and her sympathy went out to the sick woman, laid up in some dark tenement and waiting through the long hours for her husband’s return. Her case was sad; and yet she had a husband and a child and a home of her own; her life was fuller than the empty existence of a girl who had nothing to do but to go shopping with her mother and to gad about to teas, with now and then a dinner or a dance or the theater. A home of her own and a husband!—what was a woman’s life without them? And so it was that what Minnie had just seen tied itself at once into the subject of her thoughts as she walked silently down the avenue by the side of her mother.
The trains rattled and ground on the Elevated almost over their heads; the clouds scattered and a faint gleam of pale March sunshine at last illumined the grayness of the day. The noon-hour rush was at its height, and the sidewalks were often so thronged that mother and daughter were separated for a moment as they tried to pick their way through the crowd.
When they came to the huge department-store they were seeking, Mrs. Henryson stood inside the vestibule as though deciding on her plan of campaign.
“Minnie,” she promulgated at last, “you had better try and match those ribbons, and I’ll go and pick out the rug for your father.”
“Shall I wait for you at the ribbon-counter?” the daughter asked.
“Just sit down, and I’ll come back as soon as I can. You look a little tired this morning, anyhow.”
“I’m not the least tired, I assure you—but I didn’t sleep well last night,” she answered, as she went with her mother to the nearest elevator.
When she was left alone, she had a little sigh of relief, as though she was glad to be able to let her thoughts run where they would without interruption. She walked slowly to the ribbon-counter in a far corner of the store, unconscious of the persons upon whom her eyes rested. She was thinking of herself and of her own future. She wondered whether that future was then hanging in the balance.