"No, that's one thing that wouldn't do. You'd be no good as a working-woman now, dearie!"
"But I must do something!" Milly wailed, "or starve and let Virgie go to her father's people. Isn't there anything I can do in the world?"
She had reached the ultimate bottom of life, she felt, and her demand had a tragic pathos in it. She waited for her answer.
"Yes!" Ernestine exclaimed, a smile of successful thinking on her broad face. "You can make a home for me—a real one—that's what you can do—fine! Now listen," she insisted, as she saw the look of disappointment on Milly's expectant face. "Listen to me—it ain't bad at all."
And she unfolded her plan, recounting again her longing for her own hearth, and proving to Milly that she could do a real, useful thing in the world, if she would make life pleasanter and happier for one who was able to earn money for three.
"Don't wait for your friends to come back," she urged. "Just pack right up as soon as you can and move downstairs. Do you suppose Virgie's asleep? We'll tell her to-morrer any way.... And you do with my shack what you want,—any old thing, so's you let me sleep there. It'll be fine, fine!"
And so it was agreed, although Milly was not greatly pleased with the prospect of becoming homemaker and companion to the Laundryman. It was not very different in essentials from her marriage with Jack, and she recognized now that she had not made a success of that on the economic side. In short, it was like so much else in her life, practically all her life, she felt bitterly,—it was a shift, a compromise, a pis-aller, and this time it was a social descent also. What would her friends say? But Milly courageously put that cheap thought out of her mind. If this was all that she could find to do to support herself and her child,—if it was all that she was good for in this world,—she would do it and swallow her pride with her tears.
And she was sincerely grateful to Ernestine for the warm-hearted way in which she had put her proposal, as if it were a real favor to her. She made this one mental reservation to herself,—it should last only until she found "something better" as a solution. When Milly told the little girl of the new move, Virgie was delighted. "It'll be like having a real man in the house again," she said. "We'll have to teach her how to speak like we do, shan't we, mama?"
Ernestine came bubbling in the next day with a new inspiration.