“Why do you call me ‘poor thing’?” she inquired.
The woman heaved another sigh. “I’m not saying. I can hold my tongue when I want to. That’s how I keep my job in this place. It’s a shame, though—really it is.”
“What is a shame?” Helen, looking into the slattern’s saturnine face, with its ludicrously doleful expression, felt an impulse to laugh in spite of her misgivings.
“You’re so young and pretty. That’s why I call it a shame. Oh, well, we all have to go that way sooner or later.”
Helen, unpleasantly impressed by the innuendo, tasted the toast. “Which way?” she asked in casual tones.
“That would be telling.” A long sigh racked the woman’s scrawny chest. “I hear a lot of things around this place that I never tell. Better eat hearty, dear. It might be your last—— Gosh! I almost said something that time, didn’t I?”
Helen, conquering her forebodings, ate in silence for a time. The slattern’s funereal face and dismal insinuations were casting a spell of gloom over her which she found hard to shake off. Finally she tried a direct question.
“Do you mean that they are going to kill me?”
The woman clasped her hands across her chest and raised mournful eyes to the ceiling. “You mustn’t ask questions, poor dear. You’ll find out soon enough. Anyhow, there’s a better world than this.”
With this piece of doubtful consolation she gathered the dishes and, with another disconsolate sigh, walked out of the room. Helen tried to tell herself that the woman had merely been exercising her imagination and that her doleful hints had come out of thin air. The meal had refreshed her, and her spirits rose while she bathed her face in cold water and arranged her attire. Having finished, she viewed herself with satisfaction in the mirror. Her elastic health and strength had obliterated nearly every trace of her distressing night.