The door opened wider, disclosing a ponderous figure with great soft hips and bosom, a small child in a torn red sweater clinging to her skirts and looking up with round frightened eyes.
"She lives on the top flo' rear. I donno as she's home."
Catherine climbed the stairs. There's nothing to be afraid of, she told herself stubbornly. The sweetish odor of leaking gas, the cold, damp smell of broken plaster and torn linoleum in the unheated halls choked her as she climbed. She was sure doors opened and closed as she passed. She felt herself an intruder, with profound racial antipathy, fear, stirring within her and around her. I won't go back, she thought. She tried to step boldly across the hall, but her rubbers made a muffled, sucking note. At last the top floor. She knocked at the rear door. No sound; merely the strained sense of someone listening.
"Flora!" she called sharply. "Are you there? It's Mrs. Hammond."
Silence. Feet shuffled on bare boards behind that door.
"Flora!" she called again, and the door crept slowly open.
"Why, Flora! What is the matter?" Catherine gazed at her. Short hair raying like twisted wires about her face, one eye an awful purple-green lump, the wide mouth cut and swollen, the broad nostrils distended—a dumb-show, a gargoyle of miserable agony. "What has happened to you?"
Flora stepped back, pushing ajar a door.
"Come in, Mis' Hammond." Her voice had the exhausted echo of riotous weeping. "Come in and set down. I was goin' to write you a message."
Catherine followed her into the living room, immaculate, laboriously furnished. The table, purple plush arm-chairs—Flora had told her when she ordered those from the installment house; lace curtains draped on a view of tenements and dangling clothes.