Then he solemnly kissed them each good-bye.
And after that, no more of Lawrence for a long time.
CHAPTER FIVE
Miss Waters was clearing out her desk that morning. She had a pupil drawing in the studio, but it was a pupil who was meek and ignorant and could be left alone. She was trying to figure out just how much she owed, writing in an exercise book, with great precision, the amount, the date, and the nature of each bill.
WILLIAM WELLS—GROCER—EGGS, COFFEE,
BREAD, JAM—MAY 4TH, 1915. $3.07.
That was an old one.... Bills for paints, brushes, paper, for headache powders, cold cream and “druggists’ sundries,” for framing, bills of carpenters, coal and wood men, icemen, butchers. And she had got into one of her panics, at the sight of all these debts, and the thought of her penniless old age. Her mind would rush round like a little animal in a cage, looking for a chance of escape. She felt trapped and terrified. She didn’t know how to earn or how to save. She foresaw herself starving in a garret, dying in the ward of a hospital, going mad, being paralysed and helpless, all the spectres that haunted her hours of serious thought.
There was a ring at the door bell. She didn’t go. She always waited hoping that the presumable collector would go away. But it rang again and again, and at last the meek little pupil called out, “I think your bell is ringing, Miss Waters!” So finally she opened the door, to see there the obliging little Italian fruiterer.
“Telephone!” he cried, in great excitement. “Telephone, Missa Wata!”
Having no telephone in her own flat, Miss Waters had long ago made an “arrangement” with Tony, by which she was permitted to give her friends his telephone number, and was to be summoned by him when anyone of them should call for her. It didn’t happen very often.
“Oh, my!” she said. “I’m so busy! Do you know who it is, Tony?”