At the noon hour Mrs. Farley came downstairs and shambled about the house, forcing herself on Alice's sight but refusing to speak. As Mrs. Farley's fingers fell into their wonted tasks the scene of the morning became less real to her than the feel of cloth and the posture of furniture. The habit of contentment crept back upon her. She wanted nothing of others. What should they want of her?
Dryly she preserved her already half-mummied antagonism.
On the glass windows that stretched, twinkling with light, across the broad front of the bakery and lunch room, the name was inscribed in a half moon of raised white letters. Behind the glass were mounds of iced cakes and piles of glossy yellow rolls resting in wooden trays.
A pink-faced German, with flat cheek bones, a stiff mustache, and narrow good-natured eyes, stood in his undershirt and trousers draped with a soiled apron, and laid out a new supply of cakes with alternate chocolate and white so that they formed a geometric pattern. Behind him on a rear wall a large clock marked six, the hands, on the stark white dial, rigid as the limbs of the crucified.
Above him lights glowed through globes of clouded glass. Groups of wagon drivers and workmen in gray jumpers sat at the tables and, leaning forward with chests to the marble tops, slopped coffee from their saucers and shoveled huge accretions of potatoes and meat into their mouths in the attitudes of hunting animals.
Outside, in the dusk, light spread hazily about the lamps in the street. Over the roofs stars quivered delicately like fiery flowers of pale green on a shaken spray.
Old women crept along in the vague brightness, their backs bent, parcels of half-wrapped bread and bits of bloody meat held preciously to their shrunken breasts or clutched in the knots of their shawls. A policeman, leaning against a post, twirled his club and stared smugly into the bright vacant faces of two pearl-rouged girls in large black velvet hats.
Mrs. Farley, very genteel in her shabbiness, shrank from the burly men and the rough children who ran almost under her feet. But she felt superior to them and the sight of them steadied her against life.
For years she had bought bread at the bakery. As she went in the smell of baked bread floated against her face like a palpable assurance of unchanging things. But the memory of the morning's scene crept over her like a coldness which she seemed to feel in the roots of her hair. It was pain to feel the warmth of life flowing away. Her coldness shuddered miserably against the heat of the room.