Chapter Eight
Wherever Emily went, at home again, she was beset by loquacious pilgrims returned from a winter in the South or in the West. At every gathering of women, the hum and babble held to that subject.
"Well, my brothers have cleared three hundred thousand on their Florida deals. And we're selling our house and leaving in October. After all, as I said to John, what's the use of slaving at housework in Illinois when you can get colored girls in Florida to do your work?"
"Well, I'd rather freeze scrubbing floors in Illinois than have those horrid black women slopping around my house. Do you know, Emily, what one of them actually said to me? There were no knobs or handles or anything on the bureau drawers in my room. Shiftless things! And when I protested, the maid said: 'Well, you don't need no handles. Leave a stocking hanging out, and give it a jerk and the drawer will come open.' I wouldn't stay in that hotel a day longer. I just told Peter I'd stood enough. That's why we went to Daytona."
"I can tell you a place where everything isn't swimming in cold grease. They have a Northern cook. Deliver me from Southern fried cooking."
"And I found that all the cream that was to be had was shipped in from Kentucky. That's three or four hundred miles. Imagine a town that has to ship in cream! They have to paint their cows, or something, and it don't agree with them."
"Well, if you'd gone to California in the first place. We've got our rooms reserved for next year. The view is superb. It scarcely rains at all there."
"I never was so sick of glare in my life. I just thought, let me get back to Illinois. That's good enough for me."
"The trouble with them is, they won't tip enough. It pays to hand out money, on the coast, to be comfortable."
And then they would turn upon Emily, to insist gluttonously upon details of Martha's health. She had acquired a skill in suave evasion that surprised her continually. It had all worked out very well, she would tell them. Martha was much better. She hadn't her color back, but that would come. Of course, Emily had thought it would have been better for her not to go back into college so soon; but she was so ambitious. After she had fallen behind her classmates in her college, she thought she would stay nearer home, in Chicago. So lucky that they had the quarter system in the university there. And if Martha didn't seem able to do the work, Emily would take her out at once. It was easier to keep an eye on her health if she studied in Chicago, and she was living just now at the Y.W.C.A. No one could detect a flaw in the Kenworthy respectability. "Why should I suppose anyone suspects us of anything?" Emily asked herself. "I've just got that habit from Martha!"