She lowered the gas and went upstairs. The hardness had, somehow, gone out of her when she thought of Willy Cameron.
"Back bad again, is it?" she asked.
"It's always bad. But I've got a pain in my left shoulder and down my arm that's driving me crazy. I couldn't wash the dishes."
"Never mind the dishes. I'm not tired. Now crawl into bed and let me rub you."
Mrs. Boyd complied. She was a small, thin woman in her early fifties, who had set out to conquer life and had been conquered by it. The hopeless drab of her days stretched behind her, broken only by the incident of her widowhood, and stretched ahead hopelessly. She had accepted Dan's going to France resignedly, with neither protest nor undue anxiety. She had never been very close to Dan, although she loved him more than she did Edith. She was the sort of woman who has no fundamental knowledge of men. They had to be fed and mended for, and they had strange physical wants that made a great deal of trouble in the world. But mostly they ate and slept and went to work in the morning, and came home at night smelling of sweat and beer.
There had been one little rift in the gray fog of her daily life, however. And through it she had seen Edith well married, with perhaps a girl to do the house work, and a room where Edith's mother could fold her hands and sit in the long silences without thought that were her sanctuary against life.
"Is that the place, mother?"
"Yes." Edith's unwonted solicitude gave her courage.
"Edie, I want to ask you something."
"Well?" But the girl stiffened.
"Lou hasn't been round, lately."
"That's all over, mother."
"You mean you've quarreled? Oh, Edie, and me planning you'd have a nice home and everything."
"He never meant to marry me, if that's what you mean."
Mrs. Boyd turned on her back impatiently.
"You could have had him. He was crazy about you. Trouble is with you, you think you've got a fellow hard and fast, and you begin acting up. Then, first thing you know--"
Some of that strange new tolerance persisted in the girl. "Listen, mother," she said. "I give you my word, Lou'd run a mile if he thought any girl wanted to marry him. I know him better than you do. If any one ever does rope him in, he'll stick about three months, and then beat it."