It was Mrs. Neugass. She was pleasantly shapeless again in cotton stuff, her bosom bulging down and over the jerked-in apron strings.
"Wait, I'll get up and close the window, Mrs. Neugass!"
"You doan' need to," she said, slamming down the window herself, opening the floor register, and seating herself rigidly on the chair that faced the bed. "I want a little talk with you, blease."
"Why, yes, Mrs. Neugass!" A wave of memory and a sense of physical misery swept over Lilly so that it was difficult for her to force the smile. But she did, sitting up in bed and hugging her knees with bare shining arms.
With nervousness patent in every move, Mrs. Neugass sat forward, pleating and unpleating a little section of her apron.
"I guess you know it, Miss Lilly, that with all the honors we got by our daughter, we're still blain, respegtable beoble."
"Of course—"
"For fifteen years in one business in one neighborhood we've such a standing that from three blocks around they come to my husband he should keep their savings. My girls—I can say it on a bible—more than anything around them was always respegtability."
"But why—"
"If I'm mistaken, Miss Luella, and blease God I should be, then excuse me for a foolish old woman, but is—is everything all right with you, Miss Luella?"