at light, cheery tapping of
her nails, like a fairy tattoo, which usually brought her mother running
to let her in. She was conscious, almost with a physical sensation, of
her mother; wanted to hold her close and, in the ecstasy of that caress,
squeeze the office weariness from her soul. The Little Mother Saint--she
was coming now--she was hurrying--

But the little mother was not hurrying. There was no response to Una's
knock. As Una stooped in the dimness of the hallway to search in her bag
for her latch-key, the pain pulsed through the top of her head again.
She opened the door, and her longing for the embrace of her mother
disappeared in healthy anger.

The living-room was in disorder. Her mother had not touched it all
day--had gone off and left it.

"This is a little too much!" Una said, grimly.

The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden's pack of cards for solitaire,
her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with
pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs.
Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers
were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where
Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a
double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes--the pillow wadded up,
the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor.... The room
represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty--and cleaning, which
Una had to do before she could rest.

She sat down on the couch and groaned: "To have to come home to this! I
simply can't trust mother. She hasn't done one--single--thing, not one
single thing. And if it were only the first time--! But it's every day,
pretty nearly. She's been asleep all day, and then gone for a walk. Oh
yes, of course! She'll come back and say she'd forgotten this was
Saturday and I'd be home early! Oh, of course!"

From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft
little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some
effect on household discipline. "Huh!" she grunted. "Got a cold again.
If she'd only stay outdoors a little--"

She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window
closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer.
From the bed her mother's voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak
that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed: "That--you--deary? I
got--summer--cold--so sorry--