“O Lord!”

“I ain’t goin’ to mention it if it aggravates you, but—­but makin’ a home out of this gray old place would help us both, Hanna.  There’s no denyin’ that.  It’s what I hoped for when I brought you home a bride here.  Just had it kinda planned.  You putterin’ around the place in some kind of a pink apron like you women can rig yourselves up in and—­”

“There ain’t a girl in Adalia has dropped out of things the way I have, I had a singin’ voice that everybody in this town said—­”

“There’s the piano, Hanna, bought special for it.”

“I got a contralto that—­”

“There never was anything give me more pleasure than them first years you used it.  I ain’t much to express myself, but it was mighty fine, Hanna, to hear you.”

“Yes, I know; you snored into my singin’ with enjoyment, all right.”

“It’s the twelve hours on my feet that just seem to make me dead to the world, come evening.”

“A girl that had the whole town wavin’ flags at her when she sung ’The Holy City’ at the nineteen hundred street-carnival!  Kittie Scogin Bevins, one of the biggest singers in New York to-day, nothing but my chorus!  Where’s it got me these eight years?  Nowheres!  She had enough sense to cut loose from Ed Bevins, who was a lodestone, too, and beat it.  She’s singing now in New York for forty a week with a voice that wasn’t strong enough to be more than chorus to mine.”

“Kittie Scogin, Hanna, is a poor comparison for any woman to make with herself.”

“It is, is it?  Well, I don’t see it thataway.  When she stepped off the train last week, comin’ back to visit her old mother, I wished the whole depot would open up and swallow me—­that’s what I wished.  Me and her that used to be took for sisters.  I’m eight months younger, and I look eight years older.  When she stepped off that train in them white furs and a purple face-veil, I just wished to God the whole depot would open and swallow me.  That girl had sense.  O God! didn’t she have sense!”

“They say her sense is what killed Ed Bevins of shame and heartbreak.”

“Say, don’t tell me!  It was town talk the way he made her toady to his folks, even after he’d been cut off without a cent.  Kittie told me herself the very sight of the old Bevins place over on Orchard Street gives her the creeps down her back.  If not for old lady Scogin, ’way up in the seventies, she’d never put her foot back in this dump.  That girl had sense.”

“There’s not a time she comes back here it don’t have an upsettin’ influence on you, Hanna.”

“I know what’s upsettin’ me, all right.  I know!”

He sighed heavily.

“I’m just the way I am, Hanna, and there’s no teachin’ an old dog new tricks.  It’s a fact I ain’t much good after eight o’clock evenin’s.  It’s a fact—­a fact!”

They sat then in a further silence that engulfed them like fog.  A shift of wind blew a gust of dry snow against the window-pane with a little sleety noise.  And as another evidence of rising wind, a jerk of it came down the flue, rattling the fender of a disused grate.