"Em!" said Mr. Jett, who was calling the numbers.
"It's nothing," she faltered, and then, regaining herself more fully, "nothing," she repeated, the roundness out in her voice this time.
The women exchanged knowing glances.
"She's all right," said Mrs. Peopping, omnipotently. "Those things pass."
Going upstairs that evening, alone in the hallway, they flung an arm each across the other's shoulder, crowding playfully up the narrow flight.
"Emmy," he said, "poor Em, everything will be all right."
She restrained an impulse to cry. "Poor nothing," she said.
But neither the next evening, which was Friday, nor for Fridays thereafter, would she venture down for fish dinner, dining cozily up in her room off milk toast and a fluffy meringue dessert prepared especially by Mrs. Plush. It was floating-island night downstairs.
Henry puzzled a bit over the Fridays. It was his heaviest day at the business, and it was upsetting to come home tired and feel her place beside him at the basement dinner table vacant.
But the women's nods were more knowing than ever, the reassuring insinuations more and more delicate.