Josephine having tired of chocolate, realized suddenly an enormous hunger for molasses candy. She sniffed like a hunting hound. “She didn't say not to go into Mrs. Mann's,” said she.
“She said anywhere; I heard her tell you,” said Maria.
“Mrs. Mann's ain't anywhere,” said Josephine, who had a will of her own. She rushed around and caught up the baby. “She's most froze,” said she. “She'll get the croup if she don't get warmed up.”
With that, Josephine carrying the baby, Maria, Gladys, and Mrs. Mann all entered the little, squalid Mann house, as hot as a conservatory and reeking with the smell of boiled molasses.
When Josephine and Maria and the baby started out again, Maria turned to Josephine.
“Now,” said she, “if you don't let me push her as far as the corner of our street, I'll tell how you took her into Mrs. Mann's. You know what She'll say.”
Josephine, whose face was smeared with molasses candy, and who was even then sucking some, relinquished her hold on the carriage. “You'll be awful mean if you do tell,” said she.
“I will tell if you don't do what you say you'll do another time,” said she.
When they reached home, Ida had not returned, but she came in radiant some few minutes later. She had read a paper on a famous man, for the pleasure and profit of the Edgham Woman's Club, and she had received much applause and felt correspondingly elated. Josephine had taken the baby up-stairs to a little room which had recently been fitted up for a nursery, and, not following her usual custom, Ida went in there after removing her outer wraps. She stood in her blue cloth dress looking at the child with her usual air of radiant aloofness, seeming to shed her own glory, like a star, upon the baby, rather than receive its little light into the loving recesses of her own soul. Josephine and also Maria were in a state of consternation. They had discovered a large, sticky splash of molasses candy on the baby's white embroidered cloak. They had washed the baby's sticky little face, but they did not know what was to be done about the cloak, which lay over a chair. Josephine essayed, with a dexterous gesture, to so fold the cloak over that the stain would be for the time concealed. But Ida Edgham had not been a school-teacher for nothing. She saw the gesture, and immediately took up the cloak herself.
“Why, what is this on her cloak?” said she.