Almost against her own wish, Mary told her. Mis' Winslow was one of those whose faces are invariable forerunners of the sort of thing they are going to say. With eyebrows, eyes, forehead, head, and voice she took the news.
"He is! Forever and ever more. When's he going to get here?"
"Week after next," Mary said listlessly. "It's an awful responsibility, ain't it—taking a child so?"
Mis' Winslow's face abruptly rejected its own anxious lines and let the eyes speak for it.
"I always think children is like air," she said; "you never realize how hard they're pressing down on you—but you do know you can't live without them."
Mary looked at her, her own face not lighting.
"I'd rather go along like I am," she said; "I'm used to myself the way I am."
"Mary Chavah!" said Mis' Winslow, sharply, "a vegetable sprouts. Can't you? Is these stocking caps made so's they won't ravel?" she inquired capably of Abel Ames. "These are real good value, Mary," she added kindly. "Better su'prise the little thing with one of these. A red one."
Mary counted over her money, and bought the red stocking cap and the basin with the puppies. Then she went into the street. The sense of oppression, of striving, that had seldom left her since that night in the stable, made the day a thing to be borne, to be breasted. The air was thick with snow, and in the whiteness the dreary familiarity of the drug store, the meat market, the post office, the Simeon Buck Dry Goods Exchange, smote her with a passion to escape from them all, to breed new familiars, to get free of the thing that she had said she would do.
"And I could," she thought; "I could telegraph to John not to send him. But Jenny—she can't. I don't see how she stands it...."