Anna Rolf arose from her bed with her beauty wasted, her youth gone. Instead of the brilliant, joyous girl, there remained the sharp-featured, sharp-tongued woman, whose sound health, clear head, and practical abilities were now, instead of a source of self-satisfaction, viewed by herself merely as a stock in trade, her only capital for the business of taking care of her children. For Leppel’s life insurance had been forfeited by the doubt cast upon the manner of his death, and their tiny home was mortgaged to its full value. Even the money designed to purchase his patent had to be returned to those from whom it had been borrowed, some of whom, bad as were the times, declined to receive it, and others would receive only a part; so that fifty dollars in all were left to help the fatherless and widow begin the world for themselves. It was a very good thing, as every one agreed, that Leppel had left his wallet in the pocket of his overcoat, which he had not remembered to put on before he wandered out to his death through that January fog.
The house was sold to satisfy the mortgage, and Anna rented two rooms on the third floor of the tall building that overshadowed the shoemaker’s dwelling to the left. Here she established herself as a dressmaker, but for a while found little custom. Karl and Dora had been her true friends throughout, with that sort of friendship which resides not only in the heart but the pocket. Indeed, but for them it is doubtful whether she could have weathered the first six months of her widowhood; for Leppel’s relations, who were all in the Far West, had, it is true, helped with his funeral expenses, but declined to be troubled further. He had always been a sort of ugly duckling among those shrewd, close-fisted people—that quiet, silent, unpractical dreamer; but they were very sorry, notwithstanding, that, in spite of his excellent wife, he had come to such a bad end.
“Under the Commune,” said Karl Metzerott, with an added bitterness derived from his own personal aggrievement, “Leppel would be alive and an honored citizen.”
“I don’t know,” said Dora doubtfully. “That man in Washington, you know, says that the machine would not pay. Would the Commune adopt a machine that would not pay?”
“It would pay, under the Commune,” replied Karl; but as this point belonged to the domain of the unprovable, Dora did not argue upon it.
“Well,” she said, “at least the Commune would not have been kinder to him than his own wife and his own relations.”
“Any woman might be unkind who saw her children threatened with starvation,” he answered gloomily.
“Yes,” she answered hesitatingly, loath to condemn Anna, yet feeling in her own soul, that she, Dora, would have acted very differently. Then, with a sudden brightness, “Anyway, Karl, the Commune wouldn’t make much difference to us. We shouldn’t be much better off, and we should not act any differently.”
“We’re pretty good Communists, you and I,” he said with a grim smile, “but what have we got by it? I tell you, Dora, we’ve got to live very close for the next year or so, if we mean to catch up.”
“I know it,” she answered, smiling; “and, Karl, I’ve thought of a way to save quite a lot of money. If Anna and her three children can live in two rooms, why can’t we? Then we could rent our bedroom, and, when winter comes, that would save coal. For you know we should be obliged to have a fire there on account of Louis,” she added apologetically.