“My dear child, I seem to remember your admiring Freddy Dabney because he is so heroically poor. It’s very good for you to come to a place like this. Now you know what it’s like to be poor, Marky. You can see precisely how romantic it really is.”
“Oh, I’ll admit Marky is a perfect little devil. But I do want you to observe that she’s been brave enough to eat part of her sandwich. Let’s go. Where is the nice smiling little man? Let’s pay our bill and go.”
Twenty feet from the bored Carters was tragedy. Gray-faced, dumb, Father stood by Mother’s chair, stroking her dull hair as she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back and forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France might have caressed his marquise.
“Mother—” he began. It was hard to say anything when there was nothing to say. “It’s all right. They’re just silly snobs. They—”
Yes, the Applebys could not understand every detail of what the well-bred Carters had said. “Interior decoration”—that didn’t mean anything to them. All that they understood was that they were fools and failures, in the beginning of their old age; that they belonged to the quite ludicrously inefficient.
Father realized, presently, that the Carters were waiting for their bill. For a minute more he stroked Mother’s hair. If the Carters would only go from this place they had desecrated, and take their damned money with them! But he had been trained by years of dealing with self-satisfied people in a shoe-store at least to make an effort to conceal his feelings. He dragged himself into the tea-room, kept himself waiting with expressionless face till Mrs. Carter murmured:
“The bill, please?”
Tonelessly he said, “Thirty cents.”
Mrs. Carter took out, not three, but four dimes—four nice, shiny, new dimes; she sometimes said at her bank that really she couldn’t touch soiled money. She dropped them on the table-cloth, and went modestly on her way, an honorable, clever, rather kindly and unhappy woman who had just committed murder.
Father picked up the ten-cent tip. With loathing he threw it in the fireplace. Then went, knelt down, and picked it out again. Mother would need all the money he could get for her in the coming wintry days of failure—failure he himself had brought upon her.