“You can't do anything. Come, Amabel.”
Eva and Amabel went away, the child rolling eyes of terror and interrogation at them, Eva impervious to all her sister's pleading.
When Andrew heard what had happened, and Fanny repeated what Eva had said, his blame for Jim Tenny was unqualified. “I've had a hard time enough, knocked about from pillar to post, and I know what she means when she talks about a checker-board. God knows I feel myself sometimes as if I wasn't anything but a checker-piece instead of a man,” he said, “but it's all nonsense blamin' the shoe-manufacturers for his runnin' away with that woman. A man has got to use what little freedom he's got right. It ain't any excuse for Jim Tenny that he's been out of work and got discouraged. He's a good-for-nothing cur, an' I'd like to tell him so.”
“It won't do for you to talk to Eva that way,” said Fanny. They were all at the supper-table. Ellen was listening silently.
“She does right to stand up for her husband, I suppose,” said Andrew, “but anybody's got to use a little sense. It don't make it any better for Jim, tryin' to shove blame off his shoulders that belongs there. The manufacturers didn't make him run off with another woman and leave his child. That was a move he made himself.”
“But he wouldn't have made that move if the manufacturers hadn't made theirs,” Ellen said, unexpectedly.
“That's so,” said Fanny.
Andrew looked uneasily at Ellen, in whose cheeks two red spots were burning, and whose eyes upon his face seemed narrowed to two points of brightness. “There's nothing for you to worry about, child,” he said.
All this was before the dressmaker, who listened with no particular interest. Affairs which did not directly concern her did not awaken her to much sharpness of regard. She had been forced by circumstances into a very narrow groove of life, a little foot-path as it were, fenced in from destruction by three dollars a day. She could not, view it as keenly as she might, see that Jim Tenny's elopement had anything whatever to do with her three dollars per day. She, therefore, ate her supper. At first Andrew had looked warningly at Fanny when she began to discuss the subject before the dressmaker, but Fanny had replied, “Oh, land, Andrew, she knows all about it now. It's all over town.”
“Yes, I heard it this morning before I came,” said the dressmaker. “I think a puff on the sleeves of the silk waist will be very pretty, don't you, Mrs. Brewster?”