“I don’t know,” Karen answered, covering the pearls again. “Maybe nothing. I like to rest; sometimes it does a person good.”
“Is any one with you at night? It might happen that you need something. Have you no one?”
“Lord, I don’t need anything,” Karen answered with as much indifference as possible. “And if I do, I can get out o’ bed and fetch it. I’m not that bad yet.” The coarseness vanished from her face, and yielded to an expression of helpless wonder as she went on hurriedly: “He offered to stay up here at night. He wanted to sleep on the sofa, so I could wake him up if I felt bad. He said he wouldn’t mind and it’d be a pleasure. He spends his whole evenings here now, and sits at the table studying in his books. Why does he study so much? Does a man like him have to do that? But what do you think of him wanting to sleep there and watch me? It’s foolish!”
“Foolish?” Ruth answered. “No, I don’t think so at all. I was going to suggest doing the same thing. He and I could take turns. I can work while I watch too. I mean, of course, if it is necessary. But it won’t do to leave any one who is sick alone at night.” She shook her head, and her ash-blond hair moved gently.
“What funny people you are,” Karen said, and thrust her disordered hair almost to her eyes. “Real funny people.” She feigned to be looking for something on the bed, and her eyes that refused to look at Ruth seemed to flee.
Ruth determined to consult Christian concerning the night-watches.
VII
She spoke to Christian, but he said that her services as a night nurse were not necessary. He could not bring himself to assign such a task to her. She amazed him by her inner clarity and ripeness of character, yet he saw the child in her that should be spared all the more because she was not willing to spare herself.
She herself had thought a great deal about him, and had arrived at definite conclusions which were not very far from the truth. To be sure, she had heard gossip in the house, both from Karen Engelschall and from others, but her own vision and instinct had taught her best. What seemed mysterious to all others revealed itself as simple and necessary to her. It was never the rare and beautiful that astonished her in life; it was always the common and the mean.
At first she had been badly frightened of Karen. The poverty in which her family had always lived had brought her into familiar contact with the ugly things beneath the surface of society, yet she had never met a woman like Karen—so degraded and so sunk in savagery. To approach her had cost her each time a pang and a struggle.