“Young man,” said I, “how much do you get a week?”
He grinned.
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
“You work like that for twenty dollars?” I asked.
“For twenty dollars!” said he. “What’s the twenty dollars?”
“Well, then—” said I.
“It’s the game!” he said. “But you don’t understand.”
“Don’t I, though!” said I. And for days the old desire for adventure, for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as restless as a volcanic island, as Madame Welstoke used to say.
It was then I used to begin to hate the baby at times. I could have loved one of my own, and the feeling that this one belonged to some one else, and that I probably never would have the touch of hands that belonged to me, haunted me like a gray worm crawling through my head. Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I’d dust the powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I wished the trial would hurry to come and go, so Mrs. Colfax, who was writing such pathetic, patient letters about her baby, could return, and I laid many a curse on the fat doctor for making so much fuss about her nervous condition and for sending her away.
I could not go to the court and I had to pick up what I could of the trial, as it went on, from gossip and reading of papers in my own room after I had gone to bed. Sometimes I’d wheel Julianna down the street to the court-house, and then I’d see men with fingers raised as if they were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers, sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old soldiers’ home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Café for their lunch. The murder mystery had brought up a lot of curious people from the city, and I remember one—a woman with folds of skin under her chin and plenty of diamond rings—who wiped her eyes, pretending there were tears in them.