CHAPTER III
It was a submissive enough little figure that they had hustled home through the crowded streets, up the front stoop and into the brick house on Wabash Avenue. Crushed and rumpled.
The crudest edge of the things they said to her was mercifully dulled by the time it penetrated her numbed consciousness. She hardly seemed to hear them. At intervals she sobbed. It was more than a sob. It was a dry paroxysm that shook her whole body and jarred her head. Her handkerchief, a wet gray ball, she opened, and began to stare at its neatly hemstitched border, turning it corner for corner, round and round.
Who was he? Who was he?
She told them.
At each fresh accusation she seemed to shrink into smaller compass; to occupy less space within the circle of her outstanding hoop-skirts, until finally she was just a pair of hunted eyes in a tangle of ringlets, handkerchief, and crinoline. She caught fragments of what they were saying ... ruined her life ... brought down disgrace ... entire family ... never hold head up ... common lout like a Dick ... Dick!... Dick!...
Once Charlotte raised her head and launched a feeble something that sounded like "... Hendrik Hudson," but it was lost in the torrent of talk. It appeared that she had not only ruined herself and brought lifelong disgrace upon her parents' hitherto unsullied name, but she had made improbable any future matrimonial prospects for her sister Carrie—then aged eight.
That, unfortunately, struck Charlotte as being humorous. Racked though she was, one remote corner of her mind's eye pictured the waspish little Carrie, in pinafore and strapped slippers, languishing for love, all forlorn—Carrie, who still stuck her tongue out by way of repartee. Charlotte giggled suddenly, quite without meaning to. Hysteria, probably. At this fresh exhibition of shamelessness her parents were aghast.
"Well! And you can laugh!" shouted Isaac Thrift through the soft and unheeded susurrus of his wife's Sh-sh-sh! "As if I hadn't enough trouble, with this war"—it sounded like a private personal grievance—"and business what it is, and real estate practically worth——"
"Sh-sh-sh! Carrie will hear you. The child mustn't know of this."