“I wasn’t going to keep it open any longer. Much. And I can drop the magazines again, into the cellar.”
“Don’t talk back! You’ve chilled the entire upstairs, you lazy thing!”
Netta Bailey was not in a good mood. Cleaning house was far from her favorite task. The new hired woman was proving incompetent. And having Nora about was a liability. The imp had cooled off the hall and bedroom, spread magazines over half the yard, and left a trail of papers from the closet to the window. Furthermore, Mrs. Bailey now realized, having I he child in the house made it practically impossible for her to relax, now and again during this hectic day, with a highball. Nora would unquestionably report the practice as extreme alcoholism.
Nora, on her part, was not in a much better mood. “I’m not talking back,” she said calmly. “I’m explaining. What I’m doing is efficient. If you want me to slave around here for you all morning—”
“Shut up,” Mrs. Bailey said. “Pick up everything in the hall. Then put your things on and go out there in the yard. You’ll have to stack the stuff on the back porch, now. Beau hasn’t been able to get those cellar doors open for two years.”
Fuming silently, Nora obeyed.
She was appalled at the amount of snow-covered lawn upon which the falling periodicals had been distributed. She began to pick them up in a desultory way.
A theory she had often entertained in the past now absorbed her: people picked on her.
There was something about her—maybe she was a genius, and people cannot tolerate superiority—that caused everybody to want to hurt her feelings, make things difficult for her, scold her, measure out a full and acrid—whatever that was—dose of injustice.
Old lady Bailey was on her high horse, too. Nora thought that probably by the time her family got back, old lady Bailey would have locked her in a closet. Things seemed to work out that way for Nora. Her own home was right there, a couple of hundred feet away, and she couldn’t even get in. Probably. She stopped collecting magazines and listened. The vacuum was droning.