“He’s in there with her waitin’ for ye,” she said.
It was a stunned Linda who slowly dropped her arm, stood erect, and lifted her head very high. She thought intently.
“You don’t mean to tell me,” she said, “that you have been crying over her?”
Katy held out both hands.
“Linda,” she said, “she always was such a pretty thing, and her ma didn’t raise her to have the sense of a peewee. If your pa had been let take her outdoors and grow her in the sun and the air, she would have been bigger and broader, an’ there would have been the truth of God’s sunshine an’ the glory of His rain about her. Ye know, Linda, that she didn’t ever have a common dacent chance. It was curls that couldn’t be shook out and a nose that dassen’t be sunburned and shoes that mustn’t be scuffed and a dress that shouldn’t be mussed, from the day she was born. Ye couldn’t jist honest say she had ever had a fair chance, now could ye?”
“No,” said Linda conclusively, “no, Katherine O’Donovan, you could not. But what are we up against? Does she want to come back? Does she want to stay here again?”
“I think she would like to,” said Katy. “You go in and see her for yourself, lambie, before ye come to any decision.”
“You don’t mean,” said Linda in a marveling tone, “that she has been homesick, that she has come back to us because she would like to be with us again?”
“You go and see her for yourself; and if you don’t say she is the worst beat out and the tiredest mortal that ye have ever seen, you’ll be surprisin’ me. My God, Linda, they ain’t nothin’ in bein’ rich if it can do to a girl what has been done to Eileen!”
“Oh, well,” said Linda impatiently, “don’t condemn all money because Eileen has not found happiness with it. The trouble has been that Eileen’s only chance to be rich came to her through the wrong kind of people.”