Outside the snow was falling—the first snow Ingeborg had seen. It was not like the snow her mother had told her there was in Denmark. There were no sleigh bells here, no dark fir trees to catch and hold a glittering burden, no blazing fire within. This snow was sorrowful and faint, vanishing as it touched the pavement, and through it monstrous trucks thundered by, and people were passing, all hurried, all strangers, never a familiar face.
It was growing dark in the basement kitchen. The gas stove burned with a clear blue flame in its shadowy corner. Mrs. Anders, coming into the room, was almost invisible, but Oscar saw her.
“Well?” he demanded.
She answered him in Danish, and that made him so angry that he banged down the legs of his tilted chair.
“Speak American!” he shouted.
“He don’t vant a r-room,” said Mrs. Anders. “He vent avay.”
“Yes, and everybody’s going to ‘vent avay,’ if you don’t learn some sense! I give you your food, and a nice room, and a pair of shoes last week! A hat, even, for the girl! Everything you take, and bring nothing. The two of you—ach, Gott, so dumb!”
They said nothing, Mrs. Anders and her daughter. They had to endure this, and they did endure it.
“Oscar is a good man,” said Mrs. Anders to herself. “He gives us a home—that I won’t forget. It is a home for me and Ingeborg.”
Six months ago her husband had died. The poor man had been ill a long time, and he left very little. A very bad time that had been, even though the neighbors had been so kind. Then Oscar Anders, her husband’s brother, had sent her the fare to New York, and had written that she and Ingeborg could come to live with him, and maybe could help a little in the rooming house he had just bought.