Clara jumped up. She was afraid and uncertain. She knew not why she was so. “I must see about dinner.” She tossed off her hat and was gone.
It was a little flat. The dining room, the living room, the bed room, were compact and warm in dull brown, rose, blue. They were retiscent rooms, stiff proper little places furnished as with sedate conventions. Naught of vice, naught of abandon about them: they had no strength but they were full of ease. Like married old ladies, they were at rest on something very sure. Fanny did not understand them. But in her fever she had taken and used them as a babe its nurse.
Fanny and Clara ate, almost in silence. Fanny’s half chicken ... she made her friend take the other half ... was a luscious problem. She must eat it fast ... before it got cold or spoiled ... it held her like a spell in its succulent evanescent glow. It lay in the white plate the color of sunstone.
“Since I have been here,” she said, “no one has come to your place. No one. You’ve broken up your whole life because of me. Dear Clara ... that’s a hard thing for me to know.”
“I’ve had no time for my friends. I’ve had too anxious, too wonderful a time, nursing you, Dear.”
“I was very sick?” Fanny smiled. “When I looked in the glass today I knew that. I’m an old woman, Clara.”
The girl shook her head. “Don’t talk that way!” Her eyes were full on Fanny with a joy that was not denial. She did not mind. “You are not old,” she said. “But you’re mature ... somehow I suppose, next to all us, you must seem old to yourself. You are ripe, Fanny. You are glorious.” Her face glowed with the hard repressiveness against her feeling which was her only show of feeling.
“Come, now ... to bed.”