Lucky Miss Kelly wouldn't want a place to sleep, thought Catherine, as she went about the business of unpacking and reordering the apartment. With New York rents where they were it was all they could do to shelter the family decently. Was it really decent, she wondered, as she laid the piles of Spencer's clothes away in the white dresser, and looked about the little court room where he slept. She went to the window. A hollow square, full of rain and damp odors; windows with drab curtains blowing out into the rain; window sills with milk bottles, paper bags—the signs of poor students, struggling to wrest education out of the jaws of hunger! And yet, when she and Charles had found this apartment, they had thought it fine. A large, wide, airy court; none of your air shafts. She glanced up where the roof lines cut angles against the sodden sky. Spencer did watch the stars there, on clear nights. She picked up the laundry bag, stuffed with soiled clothes, and left the room. Marian's room was next, a little larger. She had planned to have Letty's bed moved in there this fall, opposite Marian's. Flora was on her knees, her yellowed silk blouse dangling from her tight belt, as her arm rotated the mop over the floor.
"Had a pleasant summer, Flora?" asked Catherine, as she opened Marian's bag.
"Land, yes, Mis' Hammond." Flora whisked her cloth. "I'm gonna get married to a puhfessional man. He's been showing me tenshions all summer. He ain't committed hisself till last week."
"You are!" Catherine looked at her in dismay. "When?"
"Oh, I ain't gonna give up my work, Mis' Hammond. Not till I sees how he pans out. I tried that once, and my las' husband, he couldn't maintain me as I was accustomed to be. So I says to my intended, I'll get married to you for pleasure, but I keeps my job. He don't care."
Catherine laughed. She knew that Flora had made earlier experiments in marriage, once to the extent of going back to Porto Rico. But she had, through all her changes of name, kept her good humor, her cleverness, and her apparent devotion to Catherine.
She rose swiftly from her knees, her long string of green beads clinking against her pail of water.
"I believes in keeping men in his place," she said, with an expanding grin. "If you don't, they keeps you in yours."
Catherine, adding the pile of Marian's dirty clothes to the jammed laundry bag, laughed again.
"I suppose so," she said. "What am I going to do with all this laundry! You'd think we hadn't washed all summer, the way things pile up."