She let me write to Luke and tell him that she was going to visit us for a while. I told her I would take her to a school play the next night, and we looked over her things to decide what she was to wear.
"Lord, Cossy," she said, "it's been months since I've went to bed thinking I was going to have any fun the next day."
Afterward I found Mrs. Bingy sitting with her head on her hand.
"I wonder," she said, "if I done it."
"What, Mrs. Bingy?" I asked.
"When any woman in Katytown leaves her husband, I'll always think that if I hadn't gone, maybe——"
"Mrs. Bingy," I said, "suppose you had stayed. Either he'd have murdered you and the baby, too, maybe, or else you might have had another child or two—with a drunken brute for a father. If you've helped anybody like you to get away, you be glad!"
"I don't know what to make of you sometimes, Cossy," she said. "Sometimes what you say sounds so nice I bet it's wicked."
She took the child, gathered him up with a long sweep of her arm and tossed him, with one arm, on her shoulder. She was huge and brown, as she used to be; but now her life had rounded out her gauntness, and she looked fed and rested and peaceful. To see her in the little sitting-room of the flat, busy and happy and cheerful, was like seeing her soul with another body, or her body with another soul, or both. I never got over the wonder of it.