"I do not know anything about it," she said demurely, and added with one of her casual references to the illustrious dead—she treated them all as though they were contemporary—"I think Heloise might know what to do. One of the things Abelard loved about her was that she always knew what to do—she was vairee good at administrating, like Janet, don't you think?"
All the while she was filling her house—with gentle paupers! Think you how Janet raged the day she brought home the most useless citizen of all—the Poetry Girl.
Felice had been sewing for two or three days for a dentist's wife, a rather amusing job for she was stationed in an upstairs window that let one look down two streets, and at the other window in the room the dentist's white haired mother sat and gossiped softly about all the persons who came.
It was the dentist's mother who saw the Poetry Girl first, a thin figure who walked uncertainly up and down the street, eyeing doctors' signs. It was a regular streetful of doctors.
"There's a poor thing that's lost her address," crooned Mrs. Miller, "she does look sick. It's a tooth, too, see how she holds her hand to her face, you can almost see the pain."
Felice saw, that is she thought she saw. Of course no one could really see such an ENORMOUS pain as the one that was sweeping the Poetry Girl along. It was too big to see.
It was something like this. Orange red, pale blue, E flat minor, acrobatic, Ariel-like in its changes. Sometimes it made her careen heavily toward the curb—that was the time it made her head seem big and her feet very far away. Sometimes she could walk but she wanted to scream, sometimes she felt like a volcano, a Vesuvius of shooting pains, sometimes it hammered at her ears and she couldn't hear at all. But one thing she remembered all the time, that she had exactly twenty-seven cents in her purse.
She was planning whether she'd better dash up to a door and act as though she had an appointment and give a false address for the bill to be sent or whether she'd better announce she hadn't any way to pay the dentist and would he take his pay in poetry, or whether she'd just shriek, "Stop it!"
In the end her body decided for her. It just flopped down outside the house where Felicia and Mrs. Miller were watching.
The Poetry Girl was normally very sweet tempered but she wasn't at all her usual self when she opened her eyes. She was in an operating chair and she looked accusingly at the man beside her.