She was still musing, self-absorbed, when her mother, much later, came in from the street.
There had been a great Intercessional, it seemed, at the Cathedral, with hired singers, from the Opera-house and society women as thick as thieves, “gnats,” she had meant to say (Tee-hee!), about a corpse. Arturo Arrivabene ... a voice like a bull ... and she had caught a glimpse of Edna driving on the Avenue Amanda, looking almost Spanish in a bandeau beneath a beautiful grey tilt hat.
But Miami’s abstraction discouraged confidences.
“Why you so triste, Chile? Dair no good, at all, in frettin’.”
“Sh’o nuff.”
“Dat death was on de cards, my deah, an’ dair is no mistakin’ de fac’; an’ as de shark is a rapid feeder it all ober sooner dan wid de crocodile, which is some consolation for dose dat remain to mourn.”
“Sh’o, it bring not an attom to me!”
“’Cos de process ob de crocodile bein’ sloweh dan dat ob de shark—”
“Ah, say no more,” Miami moaned, throwing herself in a storm of grief across the bed. And as all efforts to appease made matters only worse, Mrs. Mouth prudently left her.
“Prancing Nigger, she seem dat sollumcholly an’ depressed,” Mrs. Mouth remarked at dinner, helping herself to some guava-jelly, that had partly dissolved through lack of ice.