The room was heavy with stale air and bare of any comforts. A tattered First Reader lay on the greasy floor, unwashed dishes cluttered the bare pine table, on every available shelf and in every corner were piled old cans and bottles and half-filled paper bags. On a what-not in the corner a faded bunch of pink paper roses drooped over a cracked vase. The wallpaper, its ugly pattern mercifully faded, was fantastically streaked from the dampness, in one corner the ceiling plaster had fallen and newspapers had been tacked over the laths to keep out the cold.
A sickening revulsion, a longing to escape into the sweet crisp air swept Robin. She shrank away into a corner for fear the dreadful old Granny might touch her. But she must say something! She had come here for a purpose—to know Susy.
At that moment Susy's voice pealed out in a merry, piping laugh—because she had put her small finger into her cookie and pulled out a fat round currant! And something in the laugh touched the spark to the mothering instinct strong in Robin's young heart—the mothering instinct that had caused her bitter anguish over Cynthia's loss, that had taught her how to care for her Jimmie, and had given her strength to run away from her Jimmie that he might have his "chance." She forgot the dirty surroundings, the old Granny in her rags and her crown of wispy gray hair, she saw only the child's face, lightened with joy, and laughed with Susy as Susy held out the currant on the end of an uplifted—and very dirty—finger.
The ice broken, Susy made friends quickly. She leaned her thin little self against Robin's knee and stared with rapture into Robin's face. Like Granny she could not seem to realize that Robin was a Forsyth; to her she was "a big girl" and big girls did not come to the house now that Sarah had died. She timidly touched Robin's soft coat sleeve with a rough, sticky hand and poked at the bright buttons of Robin's blouse, her eyes round with wonder.
Afterward, after Robin and Mrs. Lynch had, with some difficulty, broken away from Susy's clinging and Granny's childish lamentations, and were walking back through the "cathedral aisle" Robin gave herself a little shake as though to rouse herself from some nightmare.
"Oh, Mrs. Lynch, it's dreadful!"
"What, dearie?" Mrs. Lynch had been thinking that Granny Castle couldn't be one of the Castle's of her old-country county.
"That place. Are they all like that? How can they live?"
Mrs. Lynch hesitated a moment and there was a perceptible tightening of her tender lips.
"Well, dearie, people have to live—life goes on in spite of things. Maybe poor old Granny wishes real often it'd been her that had been taken instead of that poor Sarah. Things weren't so bad for them when Sarah lived—they say. She was an up-and-doing girl and kept things nice though she had to work hard to do it, poor little thing. It's in the hospital that old woman should be with some one to wait on her and keep her warm. No one but little Susy—"