"If you want to, Lena," I said, "you could come back to the flat and Mrs. Bingy would help you to make the things...."
"Would five dollars get the cloth for two dresses and two skirts and some crochet wool? Some pink wool?" asked Lena.
So she bought these things, with the five dollars that hung about her neck in a little bag. As we went out the door, she saw a bassinet, all fine whiteness and flowered blue and lace edging.
"It's a clothes basket!" she cried excitedly. "Don't you see it is? What's the matter with me making one like that?" She turned to me, laughing as boisterously as I had heard her laugh in the Katytown post-office when more traveling men than usual were sitting outside the door of the Katytown Commercial House. "Land," she said, "when I get back home, I bet I'll have everything but the baby!"
I sat beside her in the street-car, and she tried to make a hole in the paper of her parcel to see again the color of the wool she had bought for the little sack. There was thread, too, for the "three-and-five." Lena's eyes were bright and eager. She said little on the way home, and she made no objection to going with me to the flat. When we unrolled the parcel on Mrs. Bingy's dining-room table, and I saw Lena stooping and planning, I thought of the picture that we had left in the little gallery. There was a look in Lena's eyes that I had never seen there before. I heard Mrs. Bingy and her chattering happily over the patterns, and I thought that beauty has many ways of power.
Then, the next day, I had a telegram from Mrs. Carney.
"Come to see me to-day," she said. "Important."
I hurried to her, dreaming, as I had dreamed all night, of whom I might find with her. But she was alone, and in some happy excitement that was beautifully becoming to her, who was usually so grave and absent.
"Cosma," she said, "what would you say to leaving the university before you have your degree?"
I knew that very well. "I would say," I said, "that I don't care two cents about the degree, if I can get the right position without it."