Tillie fitted in her key, groped along the shadowy mantel for a match, and lighted a side gas-bracket. Her dripping umbrella traced a wet path on the carpet. She carried it out into the kitchenette and leaned it in a corner of the sink. When Angie faltered in a moment later a blue-granite coffee-pot was already beginning to bubble on the two-burner gas-stove and the gentle sizzle of frying bacon sent a bluish haze through the rooms.
"Say, Angie, how you want your egg?"
"I don't want none."
"Sure you do! I'll fry it and bring it in to you." Angie flopped down on the davenport. Her skirt hung thick and dank about her ankles, and the back of her coat and her sleeve-tops were rain-spotted and wet-wool smelling where the umbrella had failed to protect her.
She unbuttoned the coat and the front of her shirt-waist, unlaced her shoes and kicked them off her feet. In the sallow light her face, the ocher wallpaper, the light oak center-table, the matting on the floor, and the small tin trunk were of a color. She took up her shoes in one hand, her coat in the other, and slouched off to a small one-window box of a room, with an unmade cot and a straight chair two-thirds filling it.
Happy the biographers whose Desdemonas burrow damask cheeks into silken pillows, whose Prosperines limp on slim ghost-feet through Lands of Fancy! Angie limped, too; but in her flat-arched, stockinged feet, and to an unmade, tousled bed. And all the handmaids of her sex—Love, Romance, and Beauty—were strangely absent; or could the most sybaritic of biographers find them out?
Only half undressed she tumbled in, pulled the coverings tight up about her neck, and turned her face to the wall. Poor Angie! Neither Prosperine, Desdemona, nor any of the Lauras, Catherines, or Juliets, had ever sold corsets, faced the soul-racking problem of eight dollars a week, or been untouched by the golden wand that transforms life into a phantasmagoria of love.
Tillie spread her little meal on the golden-oak table in the front room.
"Come on, Angie—or if you ain't feeling well I'll bring you in a bite."
"I ain't sick."