I walked on and on, gleefully aware that I had not eaten since morning. Wasn't I beginning to feel shaky? Yes; I should certainly faint before long. But I didn't like the houses I passed. They did not look fit for my adventure. I must keep up till I reached a better neighborhood.
Anybody who knows Boston knows how cheaply my adventure ended. Columbus Avenue leads out to Roxbury Crossing. When I saw that the houses were getting shabbier, instead of finer, my heart sank. When I came out on the noisy, thrice-commonplace street-car centre, my spirit collapsed utterly.
I did not swoon. I woke up from my foolish, childish dream with a shock. I was disgusted with myself, and frightened besides. It was evening now, and I was faint and sick in good earnest, and I did not know where I was. I asked a starter at the transfer station the way to Dover Street, and he told me to get on a car that was just coming in.
"I'll walk," I said, "if you will please tell me the shortest way." How could I spend five cents out of the little I had made?
But the starter discouraged me.
"You can't walk it before midnight—the way you look, my girl. Better hop on that car before it goes."
I could not resist the temptation. I rode home in the car, and felt like a thief when I paid the fare. Five cents gone to pay for my folly!
I was grateful for a cold supper; thrice grateful to hear that Mrs. Hutch, the landlady, had been and gone, content with two dollars that my father had brought home.
Mrs. Hutch seldom succeeded in collecting the full amount of the rents from her tenants. I suppose that made the bookkeeping complicated, which must have been wearing on her nerves; and hence her temper. We lived, on Dover Street, in fear of her temper. Saturday had a distinct quality about it, derived from the imminence of Mrs. Hutch's visit. Of course I awoke on Saturday morning with the no-school feeling; but the grim thing that leaped to its feet and glowered down on me, while the rest of my consciousness was still yawning on its back, was the Mrs.-Hutch-is-coming-and-there's-no-rent feeling.
It is hard, if you are a young girl, full of life and inclined to be glad, to go to sleep in anxiety and awake in fear. It is apt to interfere with the circulation of the vital ether of happiness in the young, which is damaging to the complexion of the soul. It is bitter, when you are middle-aged and unsuccessful, to go to sleep in self-reproach and awake unexonerated. It is likely to cause fermentation in the sweetest nature; it is certain to breed gray hairs and a premature longing for death. It is pitiful, if you are the home-keeping mother of an impoverished family, to drop in your traces helpless at night, and awake unstrengthened in the early morning. The haunting consciousness of rooted poverty is an improper bedfellow for a woman who still bears. It has been known to induce physical and spiritual malformations in the babies she nurses.