The woman stepped out of the victoria. She wore a black silk Eton suit, very modish, and a black hat with a plume.
“Woman peddling without a license, Mrs. Arnold. You got to watch ’em like a hawk. . . . Get along wid you, then.” He put a hand on Selina’s shoulder and gave her a gentle push.
There shook Selina from head to foot such a passion, such a storm of outraged sensibilities, as to cause street, victoria, silk-clad woman, horses, and policeman to swim and shiver in a haze before her eyes. The rage of a fastidious woman who had had an alien male hand put upon her. Her face was white. Her eyes glowed black, enormous. She seemed tall, majestic even.
“Take your hand off me!” Her speech was clipped, vibrant. “How dare you touch me! How dare you! Take your hand!——” The blazing eyes in the white mask. He took his hand from her shoulder. The red surged into her face. A tanned weather-beaten toil-worn woman, her abundant hair skewered into a knob and held by a long gray-black hairpin, her full skirt grimed with the mud of the wagon wheel, a pair of old side-boots on her slim feet, a grotesquely battered old felt hat (her husband’s) on her head, her arms full of ears of sweet corn, and carrots, and radishes and bunches of beets; a woman with bad teeth, flat breasts—even then Julie had known her by her eyes. And she had stared and then run to her in her silk dress and her plumed hat, crying, “Oh, Selina! My dear! My dear!” with a sob of horror and pity. “My dear!” And had taken Selina, carrots, beets, corn, and radishes in her arms. The vegetables lay scattered all about them on the sidewalk in front of Julie Hempel Arnold’s great stone house on Prairie Avenue. But strangely enough it had been Selina who had done the comforting, patting Julie’s plump silken shoulder and saying, over and over, soothingly, as to a child, “There, there! It’s all right, Julie. It’s all right. Don’t cry. What’s there to cry for! Sh-sh! It’s all right.”
Julie lifted her head in its modish black plumed hat, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. “Get along with you, do,” she said to Reilly, the policeman, using his very words to Selina. “I’m going to report you to Mr. Arnold, see if I don’t. And you know what that means.”
“Well, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am, I was only doing my duty. How cud I know the lady was a friend of yours. Sure, I——” He surveyed Selina, cart, jaded horses, wilted vegetables. “Well, how cud I, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am!”
“And why not!” demanded Julie with superb unreasonableness. “Why not, I’d like to know. Do get along with you.”
He got along, a defeated officer of the law, and a bitter. And now it was Julie who surveyed Selina, cart, Dirk, jaded horses, wilted left-over vegetables. “Selina, whatever in the world! What are you doing with——” She caught sight of Selina’s absurd boots then and she began to cry again. At that Selina’s overwrought nerves snapped and she began to laugh, hysterically. It frightened Julie, that laughter. “Selina, don’t! Come in the house with me. What are you laughing at! Selina!”
With shaking finger Selina was pointing at the vegetables that lay tumbled at her feet. “Do you see that cabbage, Julie? Do you remember how I used to despise Mrs. Tebbitt’s because she used to have boiled cabbage on Monday nights?”
“That’s nothing to laugh at, is it? Stop laughing this minute, Selina Peake!”