That was what he usually called her—Mother Margaret: “Because that’s your name!” he said. “Everybody calls you Margaret, in letters. Nobody but me says ‘Mother.’”
“You want your head to be higher, don’t you?” she said now, and put down the paper roses which, all day long, she made for a great factory.
She brought him her own pillow, and under that she folded a bed-comforter. The poor little room had not a single cushion.
“Now!” she cried, “you can see all the snow there is.”
At any rate, Anthony could see nothing but snow—snow, and the dim rectangle of the Window Across.
The Window Across was the back window of an apartment which faced the avenue. Anthony’s window faced the court, and was over a store. There were three floors of families over the store, because the rooms were too old and inconvenient to use for offices. The Window Across had thin rose silk curtains at the casement and often, in the evening, one could look straight through to the front window and see bright moving figures and an unbelievable dinner table, all made of bright things. And two or three times, for ecstatic minutes, a little girl had come and stood at the Window Across. Once, indeed, she had come right away out on the fire-escape and stood there, dancing and laughing in the cold, until a white-capped maid had run in a panic and carried her in. Anthony’s window had been open then, and he had heard the maid cry: “Dear Child!”
So he always called her Dear Child.
He lay now looking through the snow to the Window Across, and imagining that the snow lay so deep that they were at last obliged to make a tunnel from one window to another, so that anybody could get out at all. But it was always he and Mother Margaret who went down the tunnel to the Window Across—never the others who came up, because the little room was so bare and so shabby and so unlike the room he imagined beyond the rose silk curtains. And always he was well and strong instead of obliged to lie in bed, as he had lain now for almost a year, to give strength to the poor back, wrenched and threatened by a fall.
Suddenly, as he looked, a beautiful thing happened. The silk curtains parted in the Window Across, the white-capped maid stood there, and she hung in the window a great wreath of Christmas holly tied with a scarlet bow.
Anthony sat up, and cried out and waved his thin little arms.