There were undeniable pock-marks on Mrs. Samstag's right forearm. Invariably it sickened her to see them. Little graves. Oh, oh, little graves. For Alma. Herself. And now Louis. Just once. Just one more little grave—
And Alma, answering her somewhere down in her heart-beats: "No, mama, no, mama. No. No. No."
But all the little pores gaping. Mouths! The pinching up of the skin. Here, this little clean and white area.
"No, mama. No, mama. No. No. No."
"Just once, darling?" Oh—oh—graves for Alma and Louis. No. No. No.
Somehow, some way, with all the little mouths still parched and gaping and the clean and quite white area unblemished, Mrs. Samstag found her way back to bed. She was in a drench of sweat when she got there and the conflagration of neuralgia curiously enough, was now roaring in her ears so that it seemed to her she could hear her pain.
Her daughter lay asleep, with her face to the wall, her flowing hair spread in a fan against the pillow and her body curled up cozily. The remaining hours of the night, in a kind of waking faint she could never find the words to describe, Mrs. Samstag, with that dreadful dew of her sweat constantly out over her, lay with her twisted lips to the faint perfume of that fan of Alma's flowing hair her toes curling in and out. Out and in. Toward morning she slept. Actually, sweetly and deeply as if she could never have done with deep draughts of it.
She awoke to the brief patch of sunlight that smiled into their apartment for about eight minutes of each forenoon.
Alma was at the pretty chore of lifting the trays from a hamper of roses. She places a shower of them on her mother's coverlet with a kiss, a deeper and dearer one somehow, this morning.
There was a card and Mrs. Samstag read it and laughed: