“No,” she said. “He is not well—yet.”
She got up, went over to the window, and stood there looking out. He couldn’t help thinking, as he regarded her round form in profile, that she looked like the[Pg 17] little wooden figures of Noah’s wife in the arks that children play with. And then he saw her face, and was sorry for his fancy. She was gazing out across the dark, snow-covered expanse of Madison Square, wonderfully misty in the falling snow, and she was silently weeping.
“No,” she said. “He is not coming back. He is very ill.”
He felt terribly sorry for her, but he could think of nothing at all to say. She came back and sat down in the full glare of the electric light. She looked intolerably pitiful, her scanty eyebrows red with weeping, her mouth compressed and trembling a little.
“And they tell me this morning that there will be no more lessons for me. It seems that I talk too much English to the pupils, and that must not be. I must talk only in Russian, and I always forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders, while she wiped her eyes, quite unaffectedly, with an elaborate little lace handkerchief.
“And now,” she said, “do you remember the word for ‘table’?”
But he couldn’t bear that.
“About your husband,” he began respectfully. “Are you sure you have a good doctor? Being in a strange country, you know—”
“I don’t need a doctor, my friend!” she told him, with a stern smile. “I have seen too much of illness and death. A doctor can tell me nothing and can do nothing for me.”