"Tomorrow," Tante Ilde answered, the light in her eye indeed put out, but her face quite pink as she stepped into the kitchen to put the broom, worn down to its wooden handle, back in its dingy corner, "Tomorrow," she continued resolutely as she reappeared, "I'm going to Fanny's."
"To Fanny's!" echoed Irma blankly and started to cry "I find it disgraceful!" But she stopped quite short as a thought came to her.... The easy way to do a hard thing. A little more of that money! What did she care? She wanted Ferry to live.
"Won't you tell Fanny about Ferry?" she began again, but gently, almost imploringly.
There was a long pause, in which the thick-boned figure of the woman her brother had loved loomed up before her in an imperative, almost menacing attitude as she waited for the answer. She had been bending closely over the hemstitching she was to finish that day for Mizzi. She had large, square-shaped hands, but she held deftly and delicately the diaphanous trifle that Mizzi would sell to some thick lady. Now she laid it down and took off her glasses, showing her eyes very strained. Her face seemed to broaden, her cheek bones to get higher, the spot of color on her cheeks was dyed deeper, harder. Everything was accented about Irma in that minute. Even the red of the little, fringed, three-cornered shawl was like life-blood spilled over her shoulders as she waited for her sister-in-law to answer and there was something increasingly minatory about her.
Strange, Frau Stacher was thinking, that Heinie should have desired her, Heinie almost an old man. But she couldn't really reason about such things, certainly not in that pause. Her thoughts had wandered because she was feeling quite dizzy and then, of course, she would do it. Irma might have known that. Those three boys had to be helped somehow into manhood, according to their needs. A generation lay between the two women, yet for a moment Irma, with that ancient mother-fierceness in her face, seemed the elder. She continued staccato:
"Ferry's got to go to the mountains. Fanny can send him if she will. Fanny's rich. Fanny's in the only good business for women in Vienna."
Frau Stacher felt the blood rush to her face. But it was pity for Irma that suddenly reddened her cheeks rather than shame for Fanny. All the pity of her heart for a moment spent itself lavishly on that unloved sister-in-law.
"It's one of the reasons I'm going—for Ferry. I'd thought of it too, and tomorrow you know it is Fanny who is taking us all—with Carli, to the cemetery," she answered finally with an immense gentleness. In her heart she handed that business of Fanny's to God, and she hoped He wouldn't take His price for it.
Irma suddenly broke into wild weeping.
"Don't speak to me about Carli again. I can't bear it. My Ferry, my son, my first born, he must live."