He gaped at her vague, pearly face, as if she had suggested some enormity. It was an ugly language, all bubbling and snorting. And a very hard one to learn!
"A hard one? Good. Can you find me a teacher somewhere?"
The door opened to frame a careworn woman in a gingham dress, who said shyly to Lilla:
"Oh, excuse me, ma'am. I thought——" And to Parr, "I'll keep your supper warm."
With her sleek bandeaux of lusterless brown hair, and her thick, straight eyebrows meeting above her nose, she looked like some model for a fifteenth century Italian painter, who had suddenly faded and now was exiled from the studio to the region of pots and pans. She was Parr's niece.
As Lilla departed down the black staircase redolent of boiled cabbage, she reflected that these surroundings were going to contaminate the sad pleasure that she planned to obtain through Parr. Her instinctive epicureanism demanded that the scene of these evocations should not be sordid.
Besides, it was intolerable that Parr, of whom Lawrence had been fond, should not be better housed.
So Lilla moved Parr and his astounded relatives to a pretty little dwelling in Greenwich Village, with waxed floors, chintz hangings at the windows, and Delia Robbia plaques in the sitting room. After seeing them installed, she said to herself:
"Poor things! How abominable I am!"
At any rate, there was nothing abominable in her having sent Parr to a surgeon who, though he doubted that the patient would ever be quite well again, guaranteed to abolish the crutches.