Her sister swore at her.
“I will not let thim lave a hand on Petey!” she cried. “They’ll not take him from me!”
“Katie, you can go with him!” Rosaleen promised. “You can go to the hospital with him and sit by him for a while, can’t she, Mr. Landry?”
“Yes,” said Nick. “It’ll be just as Rosaleen says.”
III
They had gone, Katie and her baby, in a private ambulance, and Nick had arranged with the doctor for the child’s reception. It seemed as if a terrible storm had come and gone, leaving an unnatural calm. He sat in the little hole Katie called her “parlour,” with its dirty lace curtains, its little gilt table, the two broken rocking chairs with “tidies” fastened to their backs by stained red ribbons.
Rosaleen tried to explain to him. She tried, in her tongue-tied way, to draw for him a picture of all these lives. Katie, she told him, was a wonderful woman, a wife of unlimited loyalty, a mother of passionate and ceaseless devotion. Her husband was a shipping clerk; he had worked in various department stores, but he was very unlucky; he was always hurting himself, straining his back, crushing his fingers, dropping crates on his feet. And with the three children, and big Pete laid up so often, you could see....
“And I don’t make much,” she said, simply. “Sometimes we think we can’t get on. But we do.”
She sighed, with all that dreadful resignation of hers.
But Nick had nothing to say to that recital of hers; he sat in complete silence for a long time. Rosaleen watched him covertly; she worshipped him; she thought, that in his evening dress, he was the most distinguished, the most magnificent creature she had ever seen. Oh, there was no one like him! Her Nick, who never failed her, who always understood her, who never took advantage of her misfortunes.... He did not look at her; how was she to know that he was worshipping her, abashed and humble before her matchless compassion and unselfishness. She suffered all things, endured all things, and was kind....