It was then that Carrie Samstag, even in her lovely pink nightdress a crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed, unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the cunning born of travail.
It was actually a matter of fifteen minutes, that breathless swing toward the floor, the mattress rising after her with scarcely a whisper and her two bare feet landing patly into the pale-blue room slippers, there beside the bed.
Then her bag, the beaded one on the end of the divan. The slow, taut feeling for it and the floor that creaked twice, starting the sweat out over her.
It was finally after more tortuous saving of floor creaks and the interminable opening and closing of a door that Carrie Samstag, the beaded bag in her hand, found herself face to face with herself in the mirror of the bathroom medicine chest.
She was shuddering with one of the hot chills. The needle and little glass piston out of the hand bag and with a dry little insuck of breath, pinching up little areas of flesh from her arm, bent on a good firm perch, as it were.
There were undeniable pockmarks on Mrs. Samstag's right forearm. Invariably it sickened her to see them. Little graves. Oh! oh! little graves! For Alma. Herself. And now Louis. Just once. Just one more little grave—
And Alma, answering her somewhere down in her heartbeats: "No, mamma.
No, mamma! No! No! No!"
But all the little pores gaping. Mouths! The pinching up of the skin.
Here, this little clean and white area.
"No, mamma! No, mamma! No! No! No!"
"Just once, darling?" Oh—oh—little graves for Alma and Louis. No! No!
No!