“But you’ve got to go to the North End with me and help me explain matters to Nora. You’ve got a smoother tongue than I have and she’ll listen to you.”
So Martin and I started out on our dismal mission. Nora lived on the top floor in one of the tenements. She was a stout, fair-faced woman of twenty-seven with a way of casting her head sidewise when she spoke to me, as if she had trouble with her sight. She stood gazing at us, at that unexpected hour, from behind the ironing-board. The odor of burning cloth reached my nostrils, as she stood wondering. She had burnt the shirtwaist and no amount of frantic rubbing with soap could take the scar out.
She dismissed us to the parlor while she put on a more presentable dress. Martin said not a word to me; but he pointed dumbly to his photograph in a place of honor on the mantel.
Nora came into the room exclaiming:
“Why, Martin, didn’t you let me know? What’s the matter?”
Martin started to speak; but could not. He nodded to me.
Carefully, painfully, hesitantly, I outlined Martin’s ambition to Nora. More than that I explained the reasonableness of it, the prime importance of it to their later fortunes. I tried to paint in glowing terms the high station to which Nora, through Martin, might be exalted. I leaped from point to point with enthusiastic eloquence, when the theme had mastered me. But when I had concluded, and was looking eagerly into the young woman’s face for a favorable sign, she gasped, then in a cold voice she said:
“Oh, yes, it’s all right for him; but don’t I know that if he goes to college he’ll meet other girls, better looking, better dressed, better educated than I am, or can ever hope to be. Suppose I don’t break off this engagement now, how am I to know that he’ll not forget me, throw me over. Have you thought of that in all your plans?”
“Martin’s a man of his word, I suppose,” I protested.
“You’d find me true, Nora,” declared Martin.