“Well, if I was you, I’d be glad he had it,” Mrs. Watkins went on, rocking her child in her arms. “I seen you in the crowd last night watching the soldiers. You didn’t see me, but I was noticing Mr. Freeman, an’ the way he looked after them men made me think he wished he was with ’em.”
“Oh, no, he doesn’t!” Julie protested sharply.
“Well, he looked like he did, an’ if I was you I’d be glad he had that flat foot.”
Julie did not reply. She went on earnestly setting the gathers she was running, and scratching them into place with her needle, and did it without looking up.
“You’re lucky, an’ I’m lucky that my old man don’t have to go,” Mrs. Watkins continued. “But look at my little sister-in-law. There’s my brother had to leave her, an’ she lookin’ for her first baby any day, an’ no more’n a child herself. No, I’m sorry for Miss Fogg. She is a poor old derelict all right, but I don’t think of her first these days.”
“I’m going to see her again to-morrow,” Julie said. “I’m going to get in to see her yet. She’s got to let me in to help her.”
The next morning Julie went to market early, and purchased a little nosegay of summer flowers. She lingered some time in the cool shadow of the arcade where the flower stalls were. It was pleasant to come out of the dazzle of the street into the relief under the arches, where the colored women sold herbs and simple flowers, gathered from the fields or from their own small gardens outside the city. It was a place of lovely color, refreshing the eye and enlightening the heart. Here were pot marigolds, orange and yellow and straw color, all in a great basin together, with an old black woman in a blue checked apron bending her dark wrinkled face over them. There was a drift of white marguerites, and again crimson and pink zinnias in stiff bunches. Beyond them a big bunch of althea, goldenrod in yellow masses, and still farther on, with a streak of sunlight falling over them, a tub of cosmos, the pink and white blossoms feathered with the green of their foliage. The flowers were up on stalls or down upon the floor in tubs and buckets in long rainbows of color, with the dark faces of the Negro women beside them, and every now and then some added flash of pink or blue from the bright summer frock or parasol of a purchaser.
Julie wished that Tim were there to share the delight with her. She would have liked to stand and look across the flower stalls with him beside her. It was hard to know what to buy, but at last she chose a little bunch of blue nigella, “love-in-a-mist,” and made her way home.
Later in the morning she ventured upstairs again and, holding the flowers, which she had put into a glass of water, in one hand, she knocked upon Miss Fogg’s door with the other and waited as before, standing in the empty uncarpeted hall with her heart fluttering.
There was no response to her knock; yet Julie could hear the sound of some one stirring in the room. Again she knocked and again there was no answer; yet Julie was sure that Miss Fogg was within. She waited a moment more, and then turned the handle tentatively. To her surprise the door was unlocked, and greatly daring, she pushed it open and walked in. Her first impression was of the ill-smelling and wretchedly untidy room; the next of old Miss Fogg standing by the side of her bed, glaring at her with furious, sunken eyes. She had on a soiled and torn nightgown, her gray hair fell wildly upon her neck, and her feet were bare on the floor.