One such wintry day, with the early dusk already invading, Mrs. Herman Loeb, with red circles round her very black eyes, and her unrouged face rather blotched, sat in one of the second-floor-front rooms of a double buff-brick house on Washington Boulevard, hunched up in a red-velvet chair, chin cupped in palm, and gazing, through perfectly adjusted Honiton lace curtains, at the steady line of home-to-dinner motor-cars.
Warmth lay in that room, and a conservative mahogany elegance—a great mahogany double bed, immaculately covered in white, with a large monogram heavily hand-embroidered in its center; a mahogany swell-front dresser, with a Honiton lace cover and a precise outlay of monogramed silver. Over it a gilt-framed French engraving with "Maternal Love" writ in elegant script beneath. A two-toned red rug ate in footsteps.
Mrs. Loeb let her head fall back against the chair and closed her eyes. In her dark-stuff dress with its sheer-white collar, she was part of the note of the room, except that her small bosom rose and fell too rapidly. A pungent odor of cookery began to invade; the street lamps of Washington Boulevard to pop out. The door from the hallway opened, but at the entrance of her mother-in-law Mrs. Loeb did not rise, only folded one foot closer under her.
"You, Sadie?"
"Yes."
"Herman home yet?"
"No."
"Smell? I fixed him red cabbage to-night."
"Yes, I smell."
"How she sits here in the dark. Thank goodness, Sadie, electricity we don't have to economize on."