She was scrubbing the vestibule—a task of peculiar hopelessness, because people always came in to walk over it all the time she was trying to clean it. She heard a voice say "Mommer!" and, looking up, saw her child, huddled in an old wrapper, standing before her. Angelica was struggling with a deadly nausea. She was frightened and desperate, her face a sickly white, her hair in dank disorder.
"Mommer!" she said again. "Come down-stairs! I feel awful sick!"
Her mother got up, leaving pail and brush where they were, and put an arm around this beloved child, so much taller and stronger than she, and yet, in her youth and her ignorance, so much weaker. She helped her down-stairs and into bed again.
"Lie still!" she said. "That’s the best you can do, my deary. It’ll pass away."
"Can’t you get me some sort of medicine, mommer?"
"Nothing that would help you, my deary," Mrs. Kennedy told her. "You’ve just got to bear it, Angelica."
The girl looked up with somber eyes.
"Mommer," she said, "listen! What do you guess is the matter with me?"
"Angelica, my deary, I know!"
"Then, mommer, I’m going to kill myself!"