She wanted every single passing day that spring to go and see her daughter. And every day she had to remind herself that her daughter was not anxious to be reminded of her folly. Her letters were short and not frequent. And then she wrote briefly that she had taken a room in an apartment of May Bissel's. Emily pondered that information dejectedly. Martha must be a very lonely girl if she had been forced back on to May Bissel for comradeship, for certainly at home she would have scorned her.
She abased herself to seek out Mrs. Bissel, to make inquiry about the news. Mrs. Bissel gushed and reassured her. May hadn't an apartment alone. No, indeed! Her mother wouldn't allow that, not for a moment. She and two other girls had a sitting room and two bedrooms which they rented by the month in the apartment of a grammar-school teacher. This Miss Curtis used her kitchen from six-thirty until seven-thirty in the morning, and allowed the girls to use it for their breakfast for an hour after seven-thirty. They had their lunches and their dinners out. Miss Curtis kept an eye on May. Not that May tolerated any real chaperonage, of course, but Mrs. Bissel felt always that, if May really got sick, or anything happened to her, Miss Curtis would be there to let her mother know. Miss Curtis was a thoroughly dependable woman, and she came from a town in western Iowa where Mrs. Bissel's sister lived.
And that was all the comfort Emily had. Every day she said to herself time and again: "No, I must not go. She doesn't want to see me; she told me so flatly." Finally—it seemed finally—though it was only six low-spirited weeks after they had parted in Chicago, Martha wrote and asked her mother to come and see her. The letter was not affectionate; it was scarcely cordial. Either Martha was ashamed of the way she was treating her mother, or she was intolerably lonely. Emily didn't know which.
When she saw the place her daughter of the painted room was living in, she marveled at her endurance. It was an apartment building which had been got ready hastily and cheaply for the Columbian Exposition. On the second floor front was a muddily tempestuous living room which Martha shared with the two girls. She showed it to her mother contemptuously. "Imagine sitting in a place like this. The art student did it—the one whose place I took. When they offer anybody a chair, they dump its contents out on to the floor. They're simply pigs." Out of this front room a tiny front bedroom opened, which was Martha's. It was the most comfortable room in the house. "I bought those curtains and the bedspread; but feel them, mammie. They've been up three weeks now, and they're grimy. That smoke comes in from across the street." She spoke dispiritedly. Behind the living room was a bedroom with one window which the two girls shared; behind that, off a dark hall, another bedroom, rented to a "medic"; behind that, the dining room where Miss Curtis lived; behind that, the kitchen. It was only at second sight that the bathroom seemed disgusting. It was all dark, smoke discolored, meager.
Her work in the university wasn't bad, she said. She wrote a theme every day, and it was good practice. She had to read a lot of trash in her literature courses. "I have to read every day a novel some silly flea or other wrote." (Males had been pigs a few months ago in her estimation. They had shrunk to rats, and now what less could they become than fleas? Emily wondered.) "I don't finish them. I get too sick. They revolt me. I tabulate them. Look, mammie!" She showed Emily a large notebook. "Here's seventeen what they call great novelists, and only two of them know anything, really. If they show any signs of knowing the difference between men and women, I put them in this column. 'Brass-tackers' I call them. Funny they're both Russian, isn't it? All the rest of the idiots are here." She had labeled them "Preliminaries," because they think that's all there is to it. "Oh, mammie, you must read Crime and Punishment. Dostoieffsky knew. That poor little Sonia, mother! I'll lend you this. She just covered herself up with a green shawl and shuddered when she came in. You could just see her shudder, if you were in that room." But in that room on Fifty-seventh Street no one saw Emily Kenworthy shuddering. "And that!" Martha pointed scornfully to a volume of Wells. "They make me read even that sort of stuff. You wait till people read my novel; I'll bet you they'll begin to see through those men. Why does Wells have all his maternal women sort of freaks, or something, and all his heroines not maternal? There's a reason, believe me!"
"Are you still working on the novel?"
Martha turned on her indignantly. "Well, I like that! What did you think I was putting up with this filthy place for?"
Emily suggested timidly at least occasional week-ends at home.
"Don't talk to me about that!" Martha pleaded.
Emily went back thoroughly discouraged. Was that any place of healing for the child? It was no change, if Martha was to go on working on that volume of hate. She was as hard as ever; she was thinner and she was yellow. All the comfort Emily found was in saying over and over to herself a line which had no connection in her mind with anything. She thought vaguely perhaps it came from the Bible. "What wound did ever heal but by degrees?" She tried often to think of what followed; of another wording for it. It was that line, which she felt she was not saying correctly, that she lived by. And sometimes, there in her living room, she thought of Mr. Fairbanks' unfortunate daughter. Her wound, he said, had never healed; it had corrupted and poisoned her. "I spoiled her," Emily would muse. "She's been taken away from me; I've got to stand aside." And then she would say again, because she couldn't help it, "What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"