"And Miss Harriet's going into business for herself. She's taken rooms
downtown; she's going to be Madame Something or other."
Now, at last, was Mrs. McKee's attention caught riveted.
"For the love of mercy! At her age! It's downright selfish. If she
raises her prices she can't make my new foulard."
Tillie sat at the table, her faded blue eyes fixed on the back yard, where
her aunt, Mrs. Rosenfeld, was hanging out the week's wash of table linen.
"I don't know as it's so selfish," she reflected. "We've only got one
life. I guess a body's got the right to live it."
Mrs. McKee eyed her suspiciously, but Tillie's face showed no emotion.
"You don't ever hear of Schwitter, do you?"
"No; I guess she's still living."
Schwitter, the nurseryman, had proved to have a wife in an insane asylum.
That was why Tillie's romance had only paraded itself before her and had
gone by.
"You got out of that lucky."
Tillie rose and tied a gingham apron over her white one.
"I guess so. Only sometimes--"
"I don't know as it would have been so wrong. He ain't young, and I ain't.
And we're not getting any younger. He had nice manners; he'd have been
good to me."
Mrs. McKee's voice failed her. For a moment she gasped like a fish. Then: "And him a married man!"
"Well, I'm not going to do it," Tillie soothed her. "I get to thinking
about it sometimes; that's all. This new fellow made me think of him.
He's got the same nice way about him."
Aye, the new man had made her think of him, and June, and the lovers who
lounged along the Street in the moonlit avenues toward the park and love;
even Sidney's pink roses. Change was in the very air of the Street that
June morning. It was in Tillie, making a last clutch at youth, and
finding, in this pale flare of dying passion, courage to remember what she
had schooled herself to forget; in Harriet asserting her right to live her
life; in Sidney, planning with eager eyes a life of service which did not
include Joe; in K. Le Moyne, who had built up a wall between himself and
the world, and was seeing it demolished by a deaf-and-dumb book agent whose
weapon was a pencil pad!
And yet, for a week nothing happened: Joe came in the evenings and sat on
the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not bring
herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off from day
to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted wit the childlike faith Sidney's
statement that "they'd get along; she had a splendid scheme," and took to
helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie, afraid of her
rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. And K. Le Moyne, finding his
little room hot in the evenings and not wishing to intrude on the two on
the doorstep, took to reading his paper in the park, and after twilight to
long, rapid walks out into the country. The walks satisfied the craving of
his active body for exercise, and tired him so he could sleep. On one such
occasion he met Mr. Wagner, and they carried on an animated conversation
until it was too dark to see the pad. Even then, it developed that Wagner
could write in the dark; and he secured the last word in a long argument by
doing this and striking a match for K. to read by.