“Now we’ll get out. Oh! my soul and body! It’s all clean over and done with! It didn’t last. Seems if it didn’t last a minute. Say, Jessica, if I should go back to that place some other day would you ride round and let your horse knock me down again, so’s I could come home in another carriage? Would you?”
“No, I would not! But—but if you care so much about it and will put on a whole frock and come to Washington Square I’ll ask my Cousin Margaret Dalrymple to take you with us in hers. But I guess I won’t get out. I—I’d rather not. She might not like it;” answered Jessie, more in answer to a warning nod from Ephraim who had now come up to them than from any reluctance of her own. It was, truly, a strange and most unlovely place. Lines of ragged clothing fluttered from every floor, children rolled in the gutters and fought each other savagely at the least provocation, street vendors yelled till the air was full of discord, and the whole surroundings told of that abject poverty which Jessica now beheld for the first time. Yet it interested her wonderfully, more because it was new than because she understood it. So, when Sophy insisted, she disregarded Ephraim’s warning and sprang to the sidewalk, smiling in spite of herself at the hunchback’s uptossed head and the remarkable strut she assumed for the benefit of onlookers.
“Yes, you must, Jessica Trent. Else Granny won’t believe it’s true and’ll nag me ’cause the basket’s broke. I’ll come to Washington Square all right, but I can’t—I can’t put on a whole frock. I haven’t got one. This way, right this.”
Seizing Jessica’s hand so forcibly she could not withdraw it, Sophy hurriedly led the way through a sort of dark, damp alley, running between two houses, to another tall tenement facing a court in the rear. Here there were more clothes-lines, more fluttering garments, more crying babies, and more outrageous odors. Instinctively, the stranger pinched her nose to protect it against the stench, while Sophy consolingly remarked:
“The smell ain’t nothing when you get used to it. Granny used to mind it awful, when we first moved here from over Brooklyn way. That was ’fore I can remember an’ my father was killed. She don’t now. She don’t mind anything only having to live. She’s dreadful tired of that, Granny is, ’cause she don’t much like the folks in the houses. I like ’em all right. Mind the steps! That third one isn’t there, and there’s a hole in all of ’em. I’ve got so used I know just where to step, even in the dark. Now, one more and we’ll be to Granny’s door. How funny you breathe!”
“I can’t—I can’t hardly breathe at all! It’s so—so awful high—and—smelly.”
“Pinch it again. ’Tisn’t so bad in Granny’s room. She keeps the winder open all the time. Say, Granny, Granny Briggs! Here’s Jessica Trent, away from California, wherever that is, and her horse she was a-ridin’ on Thirty-fourth Street knocked me silly and broke the basket, and she brung me home in a carriage, in a carriage, Granny Briggs! And you needn’t say she didn’t, ’cause you can go right down into the Aveny and see it standin’ on the stones a-waitin’ to take her back again to where she come from. True’s I live. You can see her for yourself!”
Jessica made her best, most “Waldron-y” courtesy, and with a grace hardly to have been looked for in such a place, the aged mistress of the one room returned it. She was a comely old body, rather ragged than untidy, and she wore a broad frilled cap on her head, and a piece of a frayed shawl pinned about her shoulders. She had a great pile of men’s overalls before her, to which she was putting the finishing stitches, “by hand,” the only sort of sewing she could get to do, and for which she was paid a miserable price. But it, and Sophy’s flower-selling, was their only source of income, and she could afford to waste no time, even to talk with this astonishing young visitor who had come.
So she rose once, bobbed a returning courtesy to Jessica’s profound one, and settled back in her chair, having scarcely paused at all in her work. Then, still sewing as if her life depended on her speed—as indeed it did—she listened in silence to the story Sophy told, only opening her lips once to remark:
“Pity the pony didn’t finish you up while it was about it, my poor child. Life isn’t worth living for such as you. Or me either,” she added gloomily, and wondering why the Californian didn’t depart. She wished she would. Sophy would have to carry home part of these garments before the shop closed for the night and poor folks had no time for idling. She expressed her desire rather promptly: