“You need not say any more,” said Bertha with the scorn expected of her. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “If she had married you, darling, instead of that Bronson man, I could have understood it—no woman could help being nicer for loving you!”
Not a Sad Story
Not a Sad Story
THE little Rhodes boy was dead. The two women who slipped out of the back door of Mrs. Rhodes’s house had red eyes, and conversed in low tones as they came down the street facing the bitter wind. One of them wore a long cloak of rich fur, which covered her from throat to ankles, but the other only drew her short gray shawl tightly around her and walked in the snow with feet encased in the carpet slippers which she had worn all night. Although one woman was young, and the other well past middle age, they had a certain likeness in the haggard look which watching and grief bring.
The early morning light shone wanly over the snow, the white houses with their closed blinds, and the range of white hills beyond. The smoke was beginning to rise from the kitchen chimneys at the back of some of the houses, where occasional lights were seen flickering to and fro, and the smell of the burning wood pervaded the frosty air.
“You’re tired,” said the older woman suddenly, as if noticing her companion’s fatigue for the first time.
“So are you, Mrs. Rawls.”