The look of concentrated hate flashed into her face again.
"He 'lows a woman ain't got no call ter read," she answered, bitterly. "I allers laid off to larn, jess ter spite him, but I ain't never got to it yit."
I came home from my office one day late in autumn, to find Mrs. Angel sitting by the fire in my room, which, as I board with friends, is never locked. Her customary trappings of woe were enhanced by a new veil of cheap crape which swept the floor, and her round, rosy visage wore an expression of deep, unmitigated grief. A patch of poudre de riz ornamented her tip-tilted nose, a delicate aroma of Farina cologne-water pervaded the atmosphere, and the handle of my ivory-backed hair-brush protruded significantly from one of the drawers of my dressing-bureau.
I glanced at her apprehensively. My first thought was that the somewhat mythical personage known as "he" had finally shuffled himself out of existence. I approached her respectfully.
"Good-evenin'," she murmured. "Pretty day!"
"How do you do, Mrs. Angel?" I responded, sympathetically. "You seem to be in trouble. What has happened?"
"A heap!" was the dismal answer. "Old Mr. Lawson's dead!"
"Ah! Was he a near relative of yours?" I inquired.
"Well," she answered,—somewhat dubiously, I thought,—"not so nigh. He wasn't rightly no kin. His fust wife's sister married my oldest sister's husband's brother—but we's allers knowed him, an' he was allers a-comin' an' a-goin' amongst us like one o' the family. An' if ever they was a saint he was one!"
Here she wiped away a furtive tear with a new black-bordered kerchief. I was silent, feeling any expression of sympathy on my part inadequate to the occasion.