a date to go to the
White City to-night, and dance, and I couldn't get out of it. I tried."
He kissed her, and his lips were moist, and he reeked of tobacco, and
though Rose shrugged impatiently away from him he knew that he had won.
Rose was not an eloquent woman; she was not even an articulate one, at
times. If she had been, she would have lifted up her voice to say now:

"Oh, God! I am a woman! Why have you given me all the sorrows, and the
drudgery, and the bitterness and the thanklessness of motherhood, with
none of its joys! Give me back my youth! I'll drink the dregs at the
bottom of the cup, but first let me taste the sweet!"

But Rose did not talk or think in such terms. She could not have put
into words the thing she was feeling even if she had been able to
diagnose it. So what she said was, "Don't you think I ever get sick and
tired of slaving for a thankless bunch like you? Well, I do! Sick and
tired of it. That's what! You make me tired, coming around asking for
money, as if I was a bank."

But Al waited. And presently she said, grudgingly, wearily, "There's a
dollar bill and some small change in the can on the second shelf in the
china closet."

Al was off like a terrier. From the pantry came the clink of metal
against metal. He was up the hall in a flash, without a look at Rose.
The front door slammed a third time.

Rose stirred her cold tea slowly, leaning on the table's edge and gazing
down into the amber liquid that she did not mean to drink. For suddenly
and comically her face puckered up like a child's. Her head came down
among the supper things with a little crash that set the teacups, and
the greasy plates to jingling, and she sobbed as she lay there, with
great tearing, ugly sobs that would not be stilled, though she tried to
stifle them as does one who lives in a paper-thin Chicago flat. She was
not weeping for the Henry Selz whom she had just seen. She was not
weeping for envy of her selfish little sister, or for loneliness, or
weariness. She was weeping at the loss of a ghost who had become her
familiar. She was weeping because a packet of soiled and yellow old
letters on the top shelf in the hall closet was now only a packet of
soiled and yellow old letters, food for the ash can. She was weeping
because the urge of spring, that had expressed itself in her only this
morning pitifully enough in terms of rhubarb, and housecleaning and a
bundle of thumbed old love letters, had stirred in her