"Why, Tillie!" said Harriet.
"Yes'm."
"Will you sit down?"
Tillie sat. She was not daunted now. While she worked at the fingers of
her silk gloves, what Harriet took for nervousness was pure abstraction.
"It's very nice of you to come to see me. Do you like my rooms?"
Tillie surveyed the rooms, and Harriet caught her first full view of her
face.
"Is there anything wrong? Have you left Mrs. McKee?"
"I think so. I came to talk to you about it."
It was Harriet's turn to be overwhelmed.
"She's very fond of you. If you have had any words--"
"It's not that. I'm just leaving. I'd like to talk to you, if you don't
mind."
"Certainly."
Tillie hitched her chair closer.
"I'm up against something, and I can't seem to make up my mind. Last night
I said to myself, 'I've got to talk to some woman who's not married, like
me, and not as young as she used to be. There's no use going to Mrs. McKee:
she's a widow, and wouldn't understand.'"
Harriet's voice was a trifle sharp as she replied. She never lied about
her age, but she preferred to forget it.
"I wish you'd tell me what you're getting at."
"It ain't the sort of thing to come to too sudden. But it's like this.
You and I can pretend all we like, Miss Harriet; but we're not getting all
out of life that the Lord meant us to have. You've got them wax figures
instead of children, and I have mealers."
A little spot of color came into Harriet's cheek. But she was interested.
Regardless of the corset, she bent forward.
"Maybe that's true. Go on."
"I'm almost forty. Ten years more at the most, and I'm through. I'm
slowing up. Can't get around the tables as I used to. Why, yesterday I
put sugar into Mr. Le Moyne's coffee--well, never mind about that. Now
I've got a chance to get a home, with a good man to look after me--I like
him pretty well, and he thinks a lot of me."
"Mercy sake, Tillie! You are going to get married?"
"No'm," said Tillie; "that's it." And sat silent for a moment.
The gray curtains with their pink cording swung gently in the open windows.
From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound
of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie
poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all,
consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at
Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the
loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood,
her empty arms, her advancing age--all this she knit into the fabric of her
story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their questions to
their gods.