PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE.
I
Mrs. Kennedy was very tired that afternoon. She had just finished scrubbing a kitchen for a tenant, crawling laboriously across the greasy soft-wood boards with her brush and her pail and her cloth. There had been some foreign sort of fish stew cooking on the stove all the time, and the smell had turned her sick. She had got splinters into her water-softened hands, and her back ached with a ferocious, burning ache. She came down the basement stairs carrying the empty pail, slowly—far more slowly than she used to come.
"There’s not a thing in for my supper," she thought. "Well, I shan’t bother to go out and get anything. I’ll just lay me down and rest. I’m tired—tired out!"
The front door was unlatched. She pushed it open with her foot, and went along to the kitchen. She wanted a cup of tea, but she couldn’t make the effort to get it ready. She couldn’t even lie down. She sat on the step-ladder chair, straightening her aching back and supporting it with one hand while her eyes roved about her neat and dismal little domain, hoping to discover what she very well knew wasn’t there—something to eat, prepared and ready.
She was beginning to be dulled and blunted by solitude. Her life’s incentive was gone; she had no reason for working and living other than an animal reason—to feed herself. Her spirit had no food, and it was perishing.
She had a vague distaste for death, which was just sufficiently stronger than her apathy to preserve her existence. She slept in her underground cave, cooked and ate what was essential, kept it and herself respectable and clean, and went dully on working, working, going wherever she was bidden, doing whatever she was told.
She had decided to go out to the corner, to buy two bananas for her supper, when the door opened and Angelica came in.
She was just the same—jaunty, swaggering. It might have been one of those long-past evenings when she came back from work, tired, but restless and hungry. She had the same shabby suit and ungloved hands.