I. MR. AND MRS. EDWARD ROBERTS; THE CHOREWOMAN
Mrs. Roberts, with many proofs of an afternoon’s shopping in her hands and arms, appears at the door of the ladies’ room, opening from the public hall, and studies the interior with a searching gaze, which develops a few suburban shoppers scattered over the settees, with their bags and packages, and two or three old ladies in the rocking-chairs. The Chorewoman is going about with a Saturday afternoon pail and mop, and profiting by the disoccupation of the place in the hour between the departures of two great expresses, to wipe up the floor. She passes near the door where Mrs. Roberts is standing, and Mrs. Roberts appeals to her in the anxiety which her failure to detect the object of her search has awakened: “Oh, I was just looking for my husband. He was to meet me here at ten minutes past three; but there don’t seem to be any gentlemen.”
The Chorewoman: “Mem?”
Mrs. Roberts: “I was just looking for my husband. He was to meet me here at ten minutes past three; but there don’t seem to be any gentlemen. You haven’t happened to notice—”
The Chorewoman: “There’s a gentleman over there beyant, readin’, that’s just come in. He seemed to be lukun’ for somebody.” She applies the mop to the floor close to Mrs. Roberts’s skirts.
Mrs. Roberts, bending to the right and to the left, and then, by standing on tiptoe, catching sight of a hat round a pillar: “Then it’s Mr. Roberts, of course. I’ll just go right over to him. Thank you ever so much. Don’t disturb yourself!” She picks her way round the area of damp left by the mop, and approaches the hat from behind. “It is you, Edward! What a horrid idea I had! I was just going to touch your hat from behind, for fun; but I kept myself from it in time.”
Roberts, looking up with a dazed air from the magazine in his hand: “Why, what would have happened?”
Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, you know it mightn’t have been you.”