At six-thirty on a Monday morning in late April (remember, nothing’s going to happen) Rose smothered her alarm clock at the first warning snarl.  She was wide-awake at once, as are those whose yesterdays, to-days and to-morrows are all alike.  Rose never opened her eyes to the dim, tantalising half-consciousness of a something delightful or a something harrowing in store for her that day.  For one to whom the wash-woman’s Tuesday visitation is the event of the week, and in whose bosom the delivery boy’s hoarse “Groc-rees!” as he hurls soap and cabbage on the kitchen table, arouses a wild flurry, there can be very little thrill on awakening.

Rose slept on the davenport-couch in the sitting-room.  That fact in itself rises her status in the family.  This Monday morning she opened her eyes with what might be called a start if Rose were any other sort of heroine.  Something had happened, or was happening.  It wasn’t the six o’clock steam hissing in the radiator.  She was accustomed to that.  The rattle of the L trains, and the milkman’s artillery disturbed her as little as does the chirping of the birds the farmer’s daughter.  A sensation new, yet familiar; delicious, yet painful, held her.  She groped to define it, lying there.  Her gaze, wandering over the expanse of the grey woollen blanket, fixed upon a small black object trembling there.  The knowledge that came to her then had come, many weeks before, in a hundred subtle and exquisite ways, to those who dwell in the open places.  Rose’s eyes narrowed craftily.  Craftily, stealthily, she sat up, one hand raised.  Her eyes still fixed on the quivering spot, the hand descended, lightning-quick.  But not quickly enough.  The black spot vanished.  It sped toward the open window.  Through that window there came a balmy softness made up of Lake Michigan zephyr, and stockyards smell, and distant budding things.  Rose had failed to swat the first fly of the season.  Spring had come.

As she got out of bed and thud-thudded across the room on her heels to shut the window she glanced out into the quiet street.  Her city eyes, untrained to nature’s hints, failed to notice that the scraggy, smoke-dwarfed oak that sprang, somehow, miraculously, from the mangey little dirt-plot in front of the building had developed surprising things all over its scrawny branches overnight.  But she did see that the front windows of the flat building across the way were bare of the Chicago-grey lace curtains that had hung there the day before.  House cleaning!  Well, most decidedly spring had come.

Rose was the household’s Aurora.  Following the donning of her limp and obscure garments it was Rose’s daily duty to tear the silent family from its slumbers.  Ma was always awake, her sick eyes fixed hopefully on the door.  For fourteen years it had been the same.

“Sleeping?”

“Sleeping!  I haven’t closed an eye all night.”

Rose had learned not to dispute that statement.