She returned to the dining-room.
Her mother's head had fallen forward on arms folded amidst the odious disorder of unclean dishes. Through a long minute Joan regarded with sombre eyes that unlovely and pitiful head, with its scant covering of greyish hair stretched taut from nape to temple and brow and twisted into a ragged knot at the back, with its hollowed temples and sunken cheeks, its thin and stringy neck emerging from the collar of a cheap and soiled Mother Hubbard. With new intentness, as if seeing them for the first time, she studied the dejected curve of those toil-bent shoulders, and the lean red forearms with their gnarled and scalded hands.
Dull emotions troubled the girl, pity and apprehension entering into her mood to war with selfishness and obstinacy.
This drudge that was her mother had once been a woman like herself, straight and strong and fashioned in clean, firm contours of wholesome flesh. To what was due this dreadful metamorphosis? To the stage? Or to Man? Or to both?... Must she in the end become as her mother was, a battered derelict of womanhood, hopeless of salvage?
Slipping to her knees, she passed an arm across the thin, sharp shoulders of the woman.
"Ma ..." she said gently.
The response was a whisper barely audible, her name breathed in a sigh: "Joan...."
Beneath her warm, strong arm there was the faintest perceptible movement of the shoulders.
"Listen to me, ma: I ain't going to forget you and Edna. I am going to work hard and take care of you."
The mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away from her daughter. Otherwise she was wholly unresponsive. Joan might have been talking to the deaf.