The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden’s pack of cards for solitaire, her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs. Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes—the pillow wadded up, the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor.... The room represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty—and cleaning, which Una had to do before she could rest.
She sat down on the couch and groaned: “To have to come home to this! I simply can’t trust mother. She hasn’t done one—single—thing, not one single thing. And if it were only the first time—! But it’s every day, pretty nearly. She’s been asleep all day, and then gone for a walk. Oh yes, of course! She’ll come back and say she’d forgotten this was Saturday and I’d be home early! Oh, of course!”
From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some effect on household discipline. “Huh!” she grunted. “Got a cold again. If she’d only stay outdoors a little—”
She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer. From the bed her mother’s voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed: “That—you—deary? I got—summer—cold—so sorry—leave work undone—”
“If you would only keep your windows open, my dear mother—”
Una marched to the window, snapped up the blind, banged up the sash, and left the room.
“I really can’t see why!” was all she added. She did not look at her mother.
She slapped the living-room into order as though the disordered bedclothes and newspapers were bad children. She put the potatoes on to boil. She loosened her tight collar and sat down to read the “comic strips,” the “Beauty Hints,” and the daily instalment of the husband-and-wife serial in her evening paper. Una had nibbled at Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Vanity Fair in her high-school days, but none of these had satisfied her so deeply as did the serial’s hint of sex and husband. She was absorbed by it. Yet all the while she was irritably conscious of her mother’s cough—hacking, sore-sounding, throat-catching. Una was certain that this was merely one of the frequent imaginary ailments of her mother, who was capable of believing that she had cancer every time she was bitten by a mosquito. But this incessant crackling made Una jumpily anxious.
She reached these words in the serial: “I cannot forget, Amy, that whatever I am, my good old mother made me, with her untiring care and the gentle words she spoke to me when worried and harassed with doubt.”
Una threw down the paper, rushed into the bedroom, crouched beside her mother, crying, “Oh, my mother sweetheart! You’re just everything to me,” and kissed her forehead.