But Nan had never been equal to the task of initiating changes in the Farley household, with its regular order of sweepings, scrubbings, and dustings; its special days for baking, its inexorable rotation in meats and vegetables for the table. And if she had needed justification she would have given as her excuse Farley’s long acceptance of his wife’s domestic routine, and the fear of displeasing him by altering it. The colored cook’s husband did the heavier indoor cleaning and maintained the yard; and the dining-room and the upper floor were cared for by a colored woman. Hardly any one employed a black second girl, and Nan would have changed the color scheme in this particular and substituted a neatly capped and aproned white girl of the type that opened the door of her friends’ houses, but the present incumbent was a niece of the cook and not to be eliminated without rending the entire domestic fabric.
Nan reached home a few minutes after five. She ran upstairs and found Farley in his room, bending over a table by the window playing solitaire. The trained nurse who had been in the house for a year appeared at the door and withdrew. Nan crossed the room and laid a hand on Farley’s shoulder. He had nearly finished the game, and she remained quietly watching his tremulous hands shifting the cards until he leaned back with a little grunt of satisfaction at the end. He put up his hand to hers and drew her round so that he could look at her.
“Still wearing that fool hat! Take it off and sit down here and talk to me.”
His small, round head was thickly covered with stiff white hair, though his square-cut beard had whitened unevenly and still showed traces of brown. While he lay in the chair with a pathetic inertness, his eyes moved about restlessly, and his bleached, gnarled fingers were never wholly quiet.
“Let’s see what you’ve been up to to-day?” he asked.
“Mamie Pembroke’s; she was having a luncheon for her cousin.”
“Just girls, I suppose?” he asked indifferently. “You must have had a lot to eat to be gone all this time.”
“Well, we went for a motor run afterward and stopped at the Country Club on the way back.”
“More to eat, I suppose. My God! everybody seems able to eat but me! I told that fool doctor awhile ago I was goin’ to shoot him if he didn’t cut off this gruel he’s feedin’ me. You can lay in corn’ beef and cabbage for to-morrow; I’m goin’ to eat a barrel of it, too. If I can get hold of some real food for a week, I’ll get out of this. I understand they’ve got Bill Harrington playin’ golf. My God! he’s two years older than I am and sits on his job every day. If I’d never knuckled under to the doctors, I’d be a well man!” The wind rustling the maple by the nearest window attracted his attention. “Open that blind, and let the air in. Things have come to a nice pass when a man with my constitution can be shut up in a dark room without air enough to keep him alive.”
It was necessary to lift the wire screen before the shutters could be opened, and he watched her intently as she obeyed him quickly and quietly.