“No, I don’t think you do,” Betty said. “Oh! kiss me again, dear, and tell me you won’t ever let me go now.”
When Nancy came in she found the lovers so oblivious to the sound of her key in the latch or her footstep in the corridor that she decided to slip into bed without disturbing them, and did so, without their ever realizing that for the latter part of the evening at least, they had a hostess within range of the sound of their voices—indeed, she was obliged to stuff the pillow into her ears to prevent herself from actually hearing what they were saying.
At first her freedom—her release from the monotonous constraint of her daily confinement at the Inn—the unaccustomed independence of her new activities which justified her most untoward goings and comings—was very soothing to her. She liked the feeling of slipping out of the house at night, accountable to no one except the redoubtable Hitty to whom she presented any explanation that happened to occur to her,—however wide its departure from the actual facts—and losing herself in the resurgent town. But after a while her liberty lost its savor. She began to feel uncared for and neglected. The unaccountable anguish in her breast was neither assuaged nor mitigated by 280 the geographical latitude she permitted herself. She kept doggedly on with her personally conducted philanthropies, but she began to feel a little frightened about her capacity for endurance. Her body and brain began to show strange signs of fatigue. She was afraid that one or the other might suddenly refuse to function.
One night, on coming out into the heterogeneous human stream on Avenue A, after a visit to a Polish family in the model tenements on Seventy-ninth Street, she ran into Dick.
“Why, Dick,” she said, “what an extraordinary place to find you!”
“Yes, isn’t it?” he said. “My business often brings me up this way.”
“Your business? What business?” she asked incredulously.
“I don’t know exactly what business it is. The ministering business, I guess.” He motioned toward the basket on her arm: “Let me carry that, and you, too, if you’ll let me, Nancy. You look tired.”