"Oh, no, for I am sure you are honest," replied Mrs. Blackburn, with the manner of affable royalty.
At last, to Caroline's inexpressible relief, they drove away amid the eager stares of the children that crowded the long straight street. "I always wonder how they manage to bring up such large families," remarked Angelica as she gazed with distant benignity out of the window. "Oh, I quite forgot. I must speak to Mrs. Macy about some pillow cases. John, we will stop at Mrs. Macy's in the next block."
In a dark back room just beyond the next corner, they found an elderly woman hemstitching yards of fine thread cambric ruffling. As they entered, she pinned the narrow strip of lawn over her knee, and looked up without rising. She had a square, stolid face, which had settled into the heavy placidity that comes to those who expect nothing. Her thin white hair was parted and brushed back from her sunken temples, and her eyes, between chronically reddened lids, gazed at her visitors with a look of passive endurance. "My hip is bad to-day," she explained. "I hope you won't mind my not getting up." She spoke in a flat, colourless voice, as if she had passed beyond the sphere of life in which either surprises or disappointments are possible. Suffering had moulded her thought into the plastic impersonal substance of philosophy.
"Oh, don't think of moving, Mrs. Macy," returned Angelica kindly. "I stopped by to bring you the lace edging you needed, and to ask if you have finished any of the little pillow slips? Now, that your son is able to get back to work, you ought to have plenty of spare time for hemstitching."
"Yes, there's plenty of time," replied Mrs. Macy, without animation, "but it's slow work, and hard on weak eyes, even with spectacles. You like it done so fine that I have to take twice the trouble with the stitches, and I was just thinking of asking you if you couldn't pay me twenty cents instead of fifteen a yard? It's hard to make out now, with every mouthful you eat getting dearer all the time, and though Tom is a good son, he's got a large family to look after, and his eldest girl has been ailing of late, and had to have the doctor before she could keep on at school."
A queer look had crept into Angelica's face—the prudent and guarded expression of a financier who suspects that he is about to be over-matched, that, if he is not cautious, something will be got from him for nothing. For the instant her features lost their softness, and became sharp and almost ugly, while there flashed through Caroline's mind the amazing thought, "I believe she is stingy! Yet how could she be when she spends such a fortune on clothes?" Then the cautious look passed as swiftly as it had come, and Mrs. Blackburn stooped over the rocking-chair, and gathered the roll of thread cambric into her gloved hands. "I can have it done anywhere for fifteen cents a yard," she said slowly.
"Well, I know, ma'am, that used to be the price, but they tell me this sort of work is going up like everything else. When you think I used to pay eight and ten cents a pound for middling, and yesterday they asked me twenty-six cents at the store. Flour is getting so high we can barely afford it, and even corn meal gets dearer every day. If the war in Europe goes on, they say there won't be enough food left in America to keep us alive. It ain't that I'm complaining, Mrs. Blackburn, I know it's a hard world on us poor folks, and I ain't saying that anybody's to blame for it, but it did cross my mind, while I was thinking over these things a minute ago, that you might see your way to pay me a little more for the hemstitching."
While she talked she went on patiently turning the hem with her blunted thumb, and as she finished, she raised her head for the first time and gazed stoically, not into Angelica's face, but at a twisted ailantus tree which grew by the board fence of the backyard.'
"I am glad you look at things so sensibly, Mrs. Macy," observed Angelica cheerfully. She had dropped the ruffling to the floor, and as she straightened herself, she recovered her poise and amiability. "One hears so many complaints now among working people, and at a time like this, when the country is approaching a crisis, it is so important"—this was a favourite phrase with her, and she accented it firmly—"it is so important that all classes should stand together and work for the common good. I am sure I try to do my bit. There is scarcely an hour when I am not trying to help, but I do feel that the well-to-do classes should not be expected to make all the sacrifices. The working people must do their part, and with the suffering in Europe, and the great need of money for charities, it doesn't seem quite fair, does it, for you to ask more than you've been getting? It isn't as if fifteen cents a yard wasn't a good price. I can easily get it done elsewhere for that, but I thought you really needed the work."
"I do," said Mrs. Macy, with a kind of dry terror. "It's all I've got to live on."