That night she called Pearl on the phone. The other receivers came down quickly, and various homely household sounds mingled in her ears—a sewing-machine's soft purring in one house—a child's cry in another—the musical whine of a cream separator in a third. She knew they were all listening, but she did not care. Even if she could not control her face, she could control her voice.
When Pearl came to the phone, Mrs. Paine invited her to come over for supper the next night, to which Pearl gave ready acceptance—and that was all. The interested listeners were disappointed with the brevity of the conversation, and spoke guardedly and in cipher to each other after Pearl and Mrs. Paine had gone: "Somebody is away, see! That's why! Gee! some life—never any one asked over only at such times—Gee! How'd you like to be bossed around like that?"
"She did not begin right—too mealy-mouthed. Did you hear what he's going to buy? No! I'll tell you when I see you—we've too big an audience right now. Don't it beat all, the time some people have to listen in—"
"O well, I don't care! Anything I say I'm ready to back up. I don't pretend I forget or try to twist out of things."
One receiver went up here, and the sound of the sewing-machine went with it.
Then the conversation drifted pleasantly to a new and quicker way of making bread that had just come out in the "Western Home Monthly."
The next evening Pearl walked over the Plover Slough to see Mrs. Paine. She noticed the quantity of machinery which stood in the yard, some under cover of the big shingled shed, and some of it sitting out in the snow, gray and weather-beaten. The yard was littered, untidy, prodigal, wasteful—every sort of machine had evidently been bought and used for a while, then discarded. But within doors there was a bareness that struck Pearl's heart with pity. The entrance at the front of the house was banked high with snow, and evidently had not been used all winter, and indeed there seemed no good reason for its ever being used, for the front part of the house, consisting of hall, front room opening into a bed-room, were unfurnished and unheated.
Mrs. Paine was genuinely, eagerly glad to see Pearl, and there was a tense look in her eyes, an underglow of excitement, a trembling of her hands, as she set the table, that did not escape Pearl.
But nothing was said until the children had gone to bed, and then Mrs.
Paine departed from her life-long habit of silence, and revealed to
Pearl the burdens that were crushing her.
She was a thin woman, with a transparency about her that gave her the appearance of being brittle. Her auburn hair curled over her white forehead, and snakily twisted around her ivory white ears. Her eyes were amber-brown, with queer yellow lights that rose and fell as she talked, and in some strange way reminded Pearl of a piece of bird's-eye maple. She was dressed in the style of twenty years before, with her linen collar inside the high collar of her dress, which was fastened with a bar pin, straight and plain like herself. In the centre of the pin was a cairn-gorm, which reflected the slumbering yellow light in her eyes. The color of her face was creamy white, like fine stationery.