It was then that the Landlady, knocking at the door, presented a card, "Mr. Ernest T. Dextwood," for Miss Gaudette, and the innocent-looking conversation exploded suddenly like a short-fused firecracker.
Rhoda in an instant was sitting bolt upright with her arms around her knees rocking to and fro in convulsive delight. Ruth much more thoughtfully jumped for Noreen's bureau drawer. But Noreen herself, after one long, hyphenated "Oh, my H-e-a-v-e-n-s!" threw off her damp, wrinkled coat, stalked over to the open window, and knelt down quiveringly where she could smother her blazing face in the inconsequent darkness.
For miles and miles the teasing lights of Other Women's homes stretched out before her. From the window-sill below her rose the persistent purple smell of violets, and the cooing, gauzy laughter of the Much-Loved Girl. Fatigue was in the damp air, surely, but Spring was also there, and Lonesomeness, and worst of all, that desolating sense of patient, dying snow wasting away before one's eyes like Life itself.
When Noreen turned again to her friends her eyelids drooped defiantly across her eyes. Her lips were like a scarlet petal under the bite of her teeth. There in the jetty black and scathing white of her dress she loomed up suddenly like one of her own best drawings—pulseless ink and stale white paper vitalized all in an instant by some miraculous emotional power. A living Cartoon of "Fatigue" she stood there—"Fatigue," as she herself would have drawn it—no flaccid failure of wilted bone and sagging flesh, but Verve—the taut Brain's pitiless rally of the Body that can not afford to rest—the verve of Factory Lights blazing overtime, the verve of the Runner who drops at his goal.
"All the time I am gone," she grinned, "pray over and over, 'Lead Noreen not into temptation.'" Her voice broke suddenly into wistful laughter: "Why to meet again a man who used to love you—it's like offering store-credit to a pauper."
Then she slammed the door behind her and started downstairs for the bleak, plush parlor, with a chaotic sense of absurdity and bravado.
But when she reached the middle of the bachelor stairway and looked down casually and spied her clumsy arctics butting out from her wet-edged skirt all her nervousness focused instantly in her shaking knees, and she collapsed abruptly on the friendly dark stair and clutching hold of the banister, began to whimper.
In the midst of her stifled tears a door banged hard above her, the floor creaked under a sturdy step, and the tall, narrow form of the Political Economist silhouetted itself against the feeble light of the upper landing.
One step down he came into the darkness—two steps, three steps, four, until at last in choking miserable embarrassment, Noreen cried out hysterically:
"Don't step on me—I'm crying!"