As she walked down the street she was at first too angry to know where she was going, but after a few moments of rapid progress she saw that she was approaching the car line which passed close to her old home. In the excitement of her wrath, the thought of her sisters—the only human beings who could be relied on unquestioningly and ungrudgingly to offer her sympathy—came to her with a sense of consolation and relief. A clock in a window showed her it was nearly five. Hannah would have been home for some time, and Hazel might be expected within an hour. Without more thought she hailed an up-town car.
As the car whisked her up the long hill from Kearney Street she thought what she would say to her sisters. Several times of late she had contemplated letting them into the secrets—or some of the secrets—of her married life and its present complications. She wanted their sympathy, for they were the only people she knew who were interested in her through affection, and did not blame her when she did things that were wrong. She also wanted to surprise them and to impress them. She wanted to see their eyes grow round, and their faces more and more startled, as she told of what Mrs. Ryan was trying to do, and how the sum of one hundred thousand dollars was hers—their sister’s—when she chose to take it. They were good people, the best people for her to tell it to. They did not know too much. They could be relied upon for a blind, uninquiring loyalty, and she could now (as she had before) tell them, not all—just enough—suppressing, as women do, those facts in the story which it were best for her to keep to herself.
She found them both at home, Hazel having been allowed to leave her work an hour earlier than usual. Sitting in a small room in the back of the house, they were surrounded by the outward signs of dressmaking. Yards of material lay over the chairs, and on a small wooden table, which fitted close to her body and upon which portions of the material lay neatly smoothed out, Hannah was cutting with a large pair of shears.
Hazel sat near by trimming a hat, a wide, flat leghorn, round which she twined a wreath of brier roses. Black velvet bows held the wreath in place, and Hazel skewered these down with long black pins, several of which she held in her mouth. Berny knew of old this outburst of millinery activity which always marked the month of April. It was the semi-annual rehabilitation of Pearl’s wardrobe, and was a ceremonial to which all the females of the family were supposed to contribute. In her own day she herself had given time and thought to it. She had even been in sympathy with the idea of the family’s rise and increase of distinction through Pearl, who was going to be many steps farther up the social ladder than her mother and her aunt, if those devoted women could possibly accomplish it.
Now, watching her sisters bent over their tasks after the heat and burden of their own day’s work, she felt a deep, heartfelt sense of gratitude that she had escaped from this humble, domestic sphere in which they seemed so content. Whether Pearl’s summer hat should be trimmed with pink or blue had once been a question which she had thought worthy of serious consideration. How far she had traveled from the world of her childhood could not have been more plainly shown her than by the complete indifference she now felt to Pearl, her hat, and its trimmings.
She had come prepared to surprise her sisters, and to shake out of them, by her revelations, the amazed and shocked sympathy she felt would ease her of her present wrath and pain. She was too overwrought to be diplomatic or to approach the point by preparatory gradations. Thrown back in the one arm-chair in the room, her head so pressed against its back that her hat was thrust forward over her forehead, she told them of her meeting with Mrs. Ryan, and the cut which she had received.
Neither Hannah nor Hazel expressed the outraged astonishment at this insult that Berny had anticipated. In fact, they took it with a tranquillity which savored of indifference. For the moment, she forgot that they knew nothing of her reason for expecting Mrs. Ryan to recognize her, and to her quivering indignation was added a last wounding sense of disappointment. The sight of Hazel, holding the leghorn hat off at arm’s length and studying it with a preoccupied, narrowed eye, was even more irritating than her remark, made mumblingly because of the pins in her mouth:
“I don’t see why you should feel so bad about that. I should think you’d have got sort of used to it by this time. She’s been cutting you for over two years now.”
“Do you think that makes it any better?” said Berny in a belligerent tone, not moving her head, but shifting her eyes to stare angrily at Hazel from under her projecting hat-brim. “Do you think you’d get used to it if Josh’s mother cut you on the street?”
It was hard to compass the idea of Josh’s deceased parent, who had left behind her a memory of almost unique meekness, cutting anybody. It made Hazel laugh and she had to bend her head down and take the pins out of her mouth before she could answer.