“Yes,” she answered, “I was—I was thinking of things that seem so far off. When I’m in Willowfield it seems as if—as if they can’t be true. Does anything ever seem like that to you, Susan?”
“Yes,” said Susan. One of her hopeless looks leaped into her eyes. She did not say what the things were, but she stared at Margery in a helpless, vacant way for a moment.
“Are you well, Susan, and have you got work?” asked Margery. “I am coming to see you to-morrow.”
They spoke of common things for a few minutes, and then went their separate ways.
Why it was that when she paid the promised visit the next day and they sat together in their old way and talked, Susan felt a kind of misery creeping slowly upon her, she could not in the least have explained. She was not sufficiently developed mentally to have been capable of saying to herself that there was a difference between this visit and the last, between this Margery and the one who had sat with her before. Her dull thoughts were too slow to travel to a point so definite in so short a length of time as one afternoon afforded.
“Your cold was a pretty bad one, wasn’t it?” she asked, vaguely, once.
“Yes,” was the answer. “It made me feel weak. But it has gone now. I am quite well again.”
After that Susan saw her but once again. As time went on she heard a vague rumour that the Latimers were anxious about Margery’s health. Just at that time the mill hands gossiped a good deal about Willowfield, because the Reverend John Baird was said to be going to Europe. That led to talk on the subject of other Willowfield people, and the Latimers among them. In the rare, brief letters Margery wrote to her protégée, she did not say she was ill. Once she said her brother Lucien had quite suddenly come to Boston to see how she was, because her mother imagined she must have taken cold.
She had been in Boston about a year then. One afternoon Susan was in her room, standing by her bed forlornly, and, in a vacant, reasonless mood, turning over the few coarse little garments she had been able to prepare for her child—a few common little shirts and nightgowns and gray flannels—no more. She heard someone at the door. The handle turned and the door opened as if the person who came in had forgotten the ceremony of knocking. Susan laid down on the bed the ugly little night-dress she had been looking at; it lay there stiff with its coarseness, its short arms stretched out. She turned about and faced Margery Latimer, who had crossed the threshold and stood before her.
Susan uttered a low, frightened cry before she could speak a word.