“No'm,” said Tillie; “that's it.” And sat silent for a moment.
The gray curtains with their pink cording swung gently in the open windows. From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age—all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their questions to their gods.
Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found an echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but a substitute for the real things of life—love and tenderness, children, a home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the floor, the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the waitress at a cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential, courageous, a woman who held life in her hands.
“Why don't you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She's your aunt, isn't she?”
“She thinks any woman's a fool to take up with a man.”
“You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my advice.”
“No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had no people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all your life nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance like this came along. What would you do?”
“I don't know,” said poor Harriet. “It seems to me—I'm afraid I'd be tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even if—”
Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter, the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.
“I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of advising me,” she said quietly. “I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think the way I do about it.”