“YOU are sure you are feeling better?” insisted Innes.
Mrs. Parrish’s answer was careful. She thought she was feeling better! She had not had one of those bad nervous headaches for a week. “It was a week come Sunday, no, it was more than that, it was of a Saturday when the last bad spell came on. It was one of those hot days, the second of the three, you remember; oh, but you were in Tucson. Did you get to Los Angeles?” Her sigh was almost ecstatic. “Los Angeles is nice. I haven’t been there for two years come September.”
“You surely will go out this summer?” The hectic color, the snapping restlessness of her hostess’ black eyes disquieted the girl.
“I’ve not decided,” evaded Mrs. Parrish. “Oh, I’m all right! That last medicine I got from Los Angeles helped me a lot. As I was saying, it was that hot Saturday, and I had my baking to do. I can’t cook on Sunday; Jim hates to see me working; I have to get at it when he’s out of the way. I think the oil must have been bad; I don’t know what Coulter was thinking of—I always insist on paying for the best; the cheap sort will smell. Maybe, it wasn’t the oil, but by noon I could hardly see. I sent back that can, and had them send out new wicks—it’s a blue-flame stove I use—but of course that didn’t cure the headache. And the cooking not done.”
Innes suggested that there were two cooks in that family! Everybody knew that Jim Parrish had developed, through the exigency of desert conditions and his wife’s headaches, into the most helpful of cooks.
Mrs. Parrish smiled with sad pride. “He’s had to do it too much. He’s too good to me, Jim is.” She was wishing she had not been grinding coffee in the lean-to when Miss Hardin came. The automobile was on her before she had time to get away, and Miss Hardin speaking to her through the screening. With the old purple flannelette waist on! She had put it on that morning for “the last time.” She hoped Miss Hardin would not notice the missing buttons. She stretched a torn and faded apron of gingham that had once been brown across her knees. She did not dare take it off. She had put on, too, her old blue alpaca skirt, promising herself that she would use it for rags, tear it up before she could ever yield to the temptation of wearing it again. She looked like a slouch, she knew; and her hands fidgeted over the deficiencies of her dress. The desert was excuse enough! The washing had to be sent out of the valley, or it had to be done by one’s self, the water boiled niggardly on a blue-flame stove. She had good things to wear, but she could see down the road a long way, and visitors were scarce; she could sight them a mile off, and get into clean clothes and be sitting waiting in the tent parlor when the folk drove up. But the new automobile of the company, seen for the first time, changed that. A puff, a rumble, and there it was upon her, with Miss Hardin smiling at her through the screen window!
“Washing or no washing, I’ll have to keep ready to see folks,” she resolved. She tried to make the hand look casual that was holding the rebellious waist together over her meager bust.
“It’s been cool since I got home,” cheered Innes.
Mrs. Parrish hoped that Miss Hardin could not see behind the rough screen into the space that was called a bedroom. The bed was tossed and tumbled; the night clothes lying around. And she had not washed last week. “I’d be ashamed to have her see those clothes,” she thought. “Take this chair, Miss Hardin,” she begged. “It’s more comfortable.” Innes asked to be allowed to stay where she was, but she had to surrender to the other’s nervous persistence.
Mrs. Parrish kept her hand over her gaping placket as she made the change. “Yes, it’s been cool,” she answered, “but, oh, the wind! Ain’t it terrible? They say as these tents won’t blow down, they are so well put together. Do you believe it, Miss Hardin? That the ‘spider’ coming down so low shelters it so that it couldn’t blow over?”