And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call, “For God’s sake, don’t wake the children!”
And they had called out, “Let him come out quiet, then.”
And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door—the weather-beaten door—with its crazy lock that didn’t half catch. The brown bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded in. Then she had done something to quiet the children—it was queer that she could not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream still lived within her, horribly distinct and real.
What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not think about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were heavy, and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency. Repeatedly she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some one of the links in that pitiless memory—what they had said to Jim; his undaunted replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room because Jim had told her to.
She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with sleep, did not reassure her.
“Mammy,” said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid list, the victim of a cactus thorn, “my toe’s all well; can I go barefoot?”
“Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a young lady, if you run barefoot now?”
Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her small feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still suspiciously inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with a Spartan courage that won her a place in the annals of household valor, had the day before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle the torturing cactus thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the operation, though afterwards she had taken the piece of dried apple that was offered her and devoured it to the last bite, as only just compensation for her sufferings.
“Dimmy dot a tore toe, too.” But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about offering proofs of his affliction. At the peril of his equilibrium, he clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over on the bed in apparent anguish.
“Less see, Jimmy,” asked his mother, anxiously.