“My land o’ life,” she says, “that’s the stalkin’ image of ’Lisbeth Note.”
“Lisbeth Note!” we all said. “Oh, it can’t be!”
It struck me, even then, how united folks are on a piece of gossip. For the Home-coming some had thought have printed invitations and some had thought send out newspapers, some had wanted free supper and some had wanted pay, and so on, item by item of the afternoon. But the minute Lisbeth Note was mentioned, we all burst into one common, spontaneous fraternal horror: “Oh, no. It couldn’t be her.”
“It is!” cries Mis’ Sykes. “It is. She’s turning in there. I thought I heard ’bus wheels in the night. It serves me right. I’d ought to got out and looked.”
We were all crowded to the window by then, looking over toward old Mis’ Note’s, that lived opposite to Mis’ Sykes’s. So we all saw what we saw. And it was that Mis’ Note’s front door opened and a little boy, ’bout four years old, come shouting down the walk toward Lisbeth. And she stooped over and kissed him. And they went in the house together and shut the door.
Then us ladies turned and stared at each other. And Mis’ Sykes says, swallowing unbeknownst in the middle of what she says: “The brazen hussy. She’s brought it back here.”
I donno whether you’ve ever heard a group of immortal beings, women or men, pounce on and mull over that particular bone? If you live somewheres in this world, I guess mebbe you hev—I guess mebbe you hev. I’m never where it happens, that I don’t turn sick and faint all through me. I don’t know how men handles the subject—here in Friendship Village we don’t mention things that has a tang to ’em, in mixed company. Mebbe men is delicate and gentle and chivalrous when they speak of such things. Mebbe that’s one of the places they use the chivalry some feels so afraid is going to die out. But I might as well own up to you that in Friendship Village us women don’t act neither delicate nor decent in such a case.
There was fourteen women in the room that day, every one of ’em except Abigail Arnold and me living what you might call “protected” lives. I mean by that that men had provided them their homes and was earning them their livings, and clothing their children; and they were caring for the man’s house and, in between, training up the children. Then we were all of us further protected by the church, that we all belonged to and helped earn money for. And also we were protected by the town, that we were all respectable, bill-paying, property-owning, pew-renting citizens of. That was us.
And over against us fourteen was Lisbeth—that her father had died when she was a baby, and her mother had worked since she was born, with no place to leave Lisbeth meantime. And Lisbeth herself had been a nice, sweet-dispositioned, confiding little girl, doing odd jobs to our houses and clerking in our stores in the Christmas rush. Till five years ago—she’d gone away. And we all knew why. Her mother had cried her eyes out in most every one of our kitchens, and we were all in full possession of the facts—unless you count in the name of the little child’s father. We didn’t know that. But then, we had so much to do tearing Lisbeth to pieces we didn’t bother a great deal with that. And there that day was the whole fourteen of us, pitching into Lisbeth Note for what she’d done—just like she was fourteen of herself, our own sizes and our own “protectedness,” and meeting us face to face.
“The idear!” says Mis’ Sykes, shaking her head, with her lips disappearing within her face. “Why, she might have been clerking in the post-office store now, a nice, steady, six-dollar-a-week position just exactly like she was when it happened.”