It was just after all this that Aggie’s cousin Will Hartford came to see her and to ask her to indorse a note for five hundred dollars. We were all struck by the change in him; he used to be a nice-looking man, rather fastidious about his clothes, but he looked thin and had a bad color that day, and as shabby as a person could be and go about.
Aggie was so sorry for him that she would have done what he asked, but Tish at once advised against it.
“Lending money to relatives is like lending seed to a canary bird,” she said. “You get paid only in song, and some of them can’t sing. What’s the matter, anyhow, Will?” she demanded, gazing at him with her usual searching glance. “You earn a good salary. You oughtn’t to be borrowing seed—I mean money.”
“Well,” he said, “Emmie’s kind of frail. She has been most ever since I married her. It’s mostly a matter of doctors and nurses.”
“Frail, how?” said Tish sharply. “Morally or physically? She used to be all right. I can remember when she ate three eggs for breakfast and was out in the pantry at eleven o’clock for a glass of milk.”
He looked pained.
“She doesn’t eat now at all, Letitia,” he said sadly. “She feeds most everything that goes up on her tray to the dog. I don’t know how she lives on what she eats.”
Well, poor Will’s story was certainly a sad one. About ten years ago Emmie had been taken sick. Fainted. And from that time on she’d just been up and down. Once they had thought it was a dropped stomach, and about the time she was all strapped up for that along came a new doctor and located something in her gall bladder. Her kidneys were wrong, too, and they’d got a new specialist lately who was laying the trouble to the thyroid gland.
“She’s had so many hypodermics that her poor skin is full of holes,” he told us. “I guess they’ve used about a hundred needles on her.”
“It’s a pity somebody wouldn’t use a needle on you,” said Tish sharply, looking at a hole in his sock.