She had suffered a new travail, but she had been needed, and that kept her important. Now she had no further task to perform except to keep a rocking chair rocking, and to knit the air with her restless old bone-needle fingers.
Her husband had killed himself because he felt disgraced, cheated, dishonorably discharged from the army of industry. She did not kill herself; she just refused to live any longer. She resigned from the church called life. She ceased to believe in it.
Dr. Chirnside when he came up again to her funeral said that she died of a broken heart, and like a faithful helpmeet went to join the faithful husband where he waited for her at the foot of the Throne.
And now another generation of the Jessamines was nothing more than an inscription on headstones.
Hot as it was in the city, Patty and David went back to it to escape the oppression of solemnity. Patty’s face was lost in thick black veils, though her tears glistened like dew in the mesh.
After the hushed loneliness and the fragrant comeliness of billowy Westchester, RoBards suffered from the noise of the train leading to the noisy city.
The children greeted him with rapture, but Immy protested:
“Papa, please don’t call me baby any longer.”
“All right, old lady,” he laughed and winked at Patty, who winked at him. And neither of them could see how childhood was already the Past for this girl. It was only from the parental eyes that the scales had yet to fall. Their daughter was another creature from what she looked to the young men—and some not so young—who stared at her where she walked or rode in the busses on her way to school, to church, to a dancing lesson.
RoBards did not know that Immy was already undergoing ogling, being followed, at times spoken to. She had entered that long gauntlet women run. Sometimes the young roughs and “b’hoys” who made the policeless street corners hazardous for women alone or in couples actually laid hands on her. She never told her father or mother of these adventures, because she did not want to worry them; she did not want them to know how much she knew; she did not want them to forbid her going about. She preferred freedom with risk to safety in the chains even of love.