“Yes, Dominie. Is there need that one wash the step at your house?”
“There is need that one explain one’s self. What have you been doing these three years?”
“I work. I work hard.”
“And your husband? What has he been doing?” I asked sternly.
Annie Oombrella’s soft face drooped. “Soyez gentil, Dominie,” she implored. “Be a kind, good man and ask him not. That make him so triste—so sad.”
“He doesn’t look well, Annie.”
“He have been ver’ seeck. Now we come home he is already weller.”
“But do you think it is wise for you to come back here?” I demanded, feeling brutal as I put the question. Annie Oombrella’s reply did not make me feel any less so. She sent a quivering look around that unspeakably messy, choked-up little hole in the wall that was home to Plooie and her.
“We have loved each other so much here,” said she.
Our Square is too poor to be enduringly uncharitable, either in deed or thought. War’s resentments died out quickly in us. No longer was Plooie in danger of mob violence. By common consent we let him alone; he made his rounds unmolested, but also unpatronized. But for Annie Oombrella’s prodigies of industry with pail and brush, the little couple in Schepstein’s basement would have fared ill.