“Well, he never came back and never wrote, and by-and-by word came that he had died and was buried; but I never could go down to see where his grave was at.”
“Didn’t you know the name of the town?”
“Yes; but it was a new place away down in the Pan Handle, and nobody I knew lived there. And I never knew anything more.”
Lee sighed hopelessly. “I hate to think of him lying neglected down there.”
“’Pears like the whole world we lived in in them days has slipped off the map,” replied the older woman; and as the room was darkening, she rose and lighted a dusty electric globe which dangled from the ceiling over the small table. “Well, I must go back into the restaurant; I hain’t got a girl I can trust to count the cash.”
Left alone, Lee Virginia wept no more, but her face settled into an expression of stern sadness. It seemed as if her girlhood had died out of her, and that she was about to begin the same struggle with work and worry which had marked the lives of all the women she had known in her childhood.
Out on the porch a raw youth was playing wailing tunes on a mouth-organ, and in the “parlor” a man was uttering silly jokes to a tittering girl. The smell of cheap cigars filled the hallway and penetrated to her nostrils. Every sight and sound sickened her. “Can it be that the old town, the town of my childhood, was of this character—so sordid, so vulgar?” she asked herself. “And mother—what is the matter with her? She is not even glad to see me!”
Weary with her perplexities, she fastened her door at last, and went to bed, hoping to end—for a few hours, at least—the ache in her heart and the benumbing whirl of her thought.
But this respite was denied her. Almost at once she began to fancy that a multitudinous minute creeping and stirring was going on about her—in her hair, over her neck, across her feet. For a time she explained this by reference to her disordered nerves, but at last some realization of the truth came to her, and she sprang out upon the floor in horror and disgust. Lighting the lamp, she turned to scrutinize her couch. It swarmed with vermin. The ceiling was spattered with them. They raced across the walls in platoons, thin and voracious as wolves.
With a choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from the chair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete her disillusionment.