“Why do you suppose Madame is so anxious to please that young man when everybody says he doesn’t pay his bills?”
“Oh,” said Florence almost bitterly, “she knows his dad’ll pay ’em. It’s everything to have a name like that. He could get away with almost anything if he just told people who he was.”
“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Hanley almost sadly. “But I hope that girl doesn’t keep those clothes. She’s too fine for such as he is.”
“Yes, isn’t she?” said Florence eagerly. “I suppose most folks would think we were crazy talking like that. He’s considered a great catch. But somehow I couldn’t see a girl like that getting soiled with being tied up to a man that’s got talked about as much as he has. She’s different. There aren’t many like that living. That is the way she looks to be. Why, she’s like some angel just walking the earth because she has to, at least that’s the impression her face gave to me. Just as if she didn’t mind things us other folks think so much about, she had higher, wonderful things to think about. I don’t often see any one that stirs me up this way and makes me think about my mother. I guess I ain’t much myself, never expected to be, but when you see some one that is you can’t help but think!”
After which incoherent sentence Florence, with a gay good-night, turned off at her corner, and Mrs. Hanley went home to a little pent-up room high up in a fourth-rate rooming-house, to wash off her paint and get a tiny supper on a small gas stove, and be a mother for a few brief hours to her little crippled son who lay on a tiny couch by the one window all day long and waited for her coming.
VII
More than four hundred miles away a freight train bumped and jerked itself into the town of Marlborough, and lumberingly came to a halt. With its final lurch of stopping a hasty figure rolled from under one of the empty cars and hurried stiffly away into the shadows as if pursued by a fear that the train upon which he had been riding without a right might come after him and compel him to ride further.
The train was over an hour late. It was due at five. It had been held up by a wreck ahead.
It was the first time that Murray Van Rensselaer had ever taken a journey under a freight car, and he felt sure it would be the last. Even though he might be hard pressed he would never resort to that mode of travel again. That the breath of life was still in him was a miracle, and he crawled into the shadow of a hedge to take his bearings.
There were others who had stolen rides in that manner, for thousands of miles, and seemed to live through it. He had read about it in his childhood and always wanted to try it, and when the opportunity presented itself just in the time of his greatest need, with a cordon of policemen in the next block and his last dollar from the ample roll he started with spent, he had lost no time in availing himself of it. But he felt sure now that if he had been obliged to stay on that truck under that fearful rumbling car, and bump over that uneven roadbed for another ten minutes, he would have died of horror, or else rolled off beneath those grinding, crunching wheels. His head was aching as if those wheels were going around inside his brain. His back ached with an ache unspeakable, and his cramped legs ached as if they were being torn from his aching body. He had never known before how many places there were in a human body to ache.