There was a catch in her voice.
"The milk!" echoed Kate blankly. "What milk? I thought--"
"Oh, I know," Marna cried impatiently. "You thought I was worrying about that old opera, and that I wanted to be up there behind that screen stabbing myself. Well, of course, knowing the score so well, and having hoped once to do so much with it, the notes did rather try to jump out of my throat. But, goodness, what does all that matter? It's the baby's milk that I'm carrying on about. I don't believe I told George to warm it." Her voice ceased in a wail.
The car swung around the corner, and Kate half lifted Marna up the huge step, and saw her go reeling down the aisle as the cumbersome vehicle lurched forward. Then she turned her own steps toward the stairs of the elevated station.
"The milk!" she ejaculated with commingled tenderness and impatience. "Then that's why she didn't say anything about going behind the scenes. I thought it was because she couldn't endure the old surroundings and the pity of her associates of the opera-days. The milk! I wonder--"
What she wondered she did not precisely say; but more than one person on the crowded elevated train noticed that the handsome woman in black velvet (it really was velveteen, purchased at a bargain) had something on her mind.
XXV
Kate slept lightly that night. She had gone to bed with a sense of gentle happiness, which arose from the furtive conviction that she was going to surrender to Ray and to his point of view. He could take all the responsibility if he liked and she would follow the old instincts of woman and let the Causes of Righteousness with which she had allied herself contrive to get along without her. It was nothing, she told herself, but sheer egotism for her to suppose that she was necessary to their prosperity.
She half awoke many times, and each time she had a vague, sweet longing which refused to resolve itself into definite shape. But when the full morning came she knew it was Ray she wanted. She couldn't wait out the long week he had prescribed as a season of fasting and prayer before she gave her answer, and she was shamelessly glad when her superior, over there at the Settlement House, informed her that she would be required to go to a dance-hall at South Chicago that night--a terrible place, which might well have been called "The Girl Trap." This gave Kate a legitimate excuse to ask for Ray's company, because he had besought her not to go to such places at night without his escort.