At the station she put Martha down where she could watch her from a telephone booth. She daren't turn towards the mouthpiece to speak for more than a second. Suppose Martha should disappear. She 'phoned one hotel after another. None of them had a room on the second floor. A horror was in her mind—a girl falling, falling, to destruction. By the time she had heard her fourth refusal she felt faint. She went back out to the waiting room. Everyone was going home. Everyone was loaded down with Christmas gayety. She sat there. And Martha sat there. They had no place to go. It was Christmas time, but there was no room for them in any inn, because of a baby.
Some place to hide; some place to plan and think. She remembered a country hotel on Long Island. Would it be open at this season? But no, it was on the Sound. She was afraid of water and that desperate girl. After a little she thought of the right place. There was a little hotel in a small New Jersey town. Years ago she and her aunt had gone there, quite unannounced, for a night, to visit an old cemetery in the neighborhood. They could go there.
Jostled and pushed about in the jam of the local train, Emily got back some of her presence of mind. She got out, with Martha, at the station, and stood looking about. She didn't remember the place at all. Cars were waiting for most of those who arrived. She asked a newsboy about the hotels. He would carry her things up and show her the way.
They turned into the quiet little main street. Yellow lights from the shops were shining out across the snow. People were hurrying along in one direction. The boy was talkative. It was only a little way to the hotel. When they drew near it, he said: "Look! Look at the Christmas tree!"
A little way farther down the street, across from the hotel, a crowd was gathered around an old lighted-up tree just near the sidewalk, in what seemed to be the front yard of a dwelling house.
"It's a real tree. It's not a cut-down one!" he informed them. "They sing there."
"I always remembered what a quiet place you had here," Emily said to the clerk. "I've always been wanting to get back." She wanted to make their arrival—on Christmas Eve—a natural thing. Would the man be suspicious?
But no. He took them in; they had a roof over them again, a room, comfortless enough, but a room, and one double bed, on which Martha had thrown herself down. They must have supper in their room to-night. Emily had begged something, anything hot. She pulled the curtains down and opened the bags, and started to get Martha to bed.
When the maid came with the supper tray, outside there, under the great glimmering tree, the crowd was singing praise to God become Baby through a woman's body; and inside Emily was looking at Martha's little breast, and her sobbing white abdomen, and a girl's flesh seemed to have become hell.
Emily had to probe her ignominy that night, for the thought kept coming to her, even after what she had seen, that Martha couldn't know what she was talking about. She had to ask her—terrible things; there was no help for that. She had to realize that her daughter had lied to her directly, thoughtfully, and cunningly. This affair had begun in the summer, before Martha had promised her never to see that man again. She had promised not to see him, knowing when they were to meet next, in Chicago. "I was so sure, mammie!" she sobbed. "I knew it would be all right when you knew him! I just loved him so!" Martha had gone back to college to lie cunningly there, to get permission to spend every week-end in New York, to study dancing, which her mother was so keen to have her take up, she had averred. Well, she had been punished, punished by having to look in the terrible face of Death. Suppose that colored bell-boy hadn't been in the drug store, there—— Emily's arms tightened about her.