Angelica.
She read it in her hoarse, thrilling voice, and it sounded so vehement, so passionate, so touching, that they both believed the letter to be so in itself.
"Now I’ll run out and mail it," she said.
Just as she was, with disheveled hair and unfastened blouse, she hurried out into the street. A man spoke to her, and she swore at him.
She was back within a few minutes, panting, but her mother was no longer in the kitchen; she had gone into the dark bedroom to quiet the poor little baby.
"I’ll hold him, Angie," she said. "You can go on ironing."
But Angelica flung herself on her knees before the child on her mother’s lap.
"Gawd! Little feller! Little love! Gawd, I wish he’d die and be out of this!"
Her mother could not rebuke her. Worn out by unending worry, by lack of sleep, by the heat, by intolerable toil for the tiny thing, she, too, could only wish it dead. It suffered so; it was so weak, so pitiful.
Night after night they had held it in their arms, close to the window, where it might get what air there was. They sang to it, rocked it, bathed its wasted little body to cool it, and all the while it wailed in its feeble voice—a weak, monotonous, heart-rending sound. They tended it by day and by night. From time to time it slept, but fitfully, the beating of its little heart shaking its emaciated body.