“It's to save mother,” said Edith, meekly.
“It's to save yourself. You can't fool me. And if you think I'm going to sit by and let him do it, you can think again.”
“It's as good as done,” Edith flashed. “I've told mother.”
“That you're going to be, or that you are?”
“That we are married.”
“All right,” Ellen said triumphantly. “She's quiet and peaceful now, isn't she? You don't have to get married now, do you? You take my advice, and let it go at that.”
It was then that Edith realized what she had done. He would still marry her, of course, but behind all his anxiety to save her had been the real actuating motive of his desire to relieve her mother's mind. That was done now. Then, could she let him sacrifice himself for her?
She could. She could and she would. She set her small mouth firmly, and confronted the future; she saw herself, without his strength to support her, going down and down. She remembered those drabs of the street on whom she had turned such cynical eyes in her virtuous youth, and she saw herself one of that lost sisterhood, sodden, hectic, hopeless.
When Willy Cameron left the pharmacy that day it was almost noon. He went to the house of mourning first, and found Mr. Davis in a chair in a closed room, a tired little man in a new black necktie around a not over-clean collar, his occupation of years gone, confronting a new and terrible leisure that he did not know how to use.
“You know how it is, Willy,” he said, blinking his reddened eyelids. “You kind of wish sometimes that you had somebody to help you bear your burden, and then it's taken away, but you're kind of bent over and used to it. And you'd give your neck and all to have it back.”