Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back porch—­she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at half-past six to go to work.

Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart.  She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some errand or other—­to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a damp tea towel.

“Ain’t you goin’ out, Tess?”

“No.”

“What you want to lop around here for?  Such a grand evening.  Why don’t you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora’s or somewhere, h’m?”

“What for?”—­listlessly.

“What for!  What does anybody go out for!”

“I don’t know.”

If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might have found relief.  But the family shyness of their class was too strong upon them.  Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy:  “Person’d think Chuck Mory was the only one who’d gone to war an’ the last fella left in the world.”

A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth.  “He is.  Who’s there left?  Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing?  Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the hack.  Guess I’ll doll up this evening and see if I can’t make a hit with one of them.”

She relapsed into bitter silence.  The bottom had dropped out of Tessie
Golden’s world.

* * * * *

In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the pleasureful.  Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room foreman that any one else would have been fired for.  Her wide mouth was capable of glorious insolences.  Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls’ wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiring group.  She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift of burlesque.  The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie gave an imitation of that advanced young woman’s progress down Grand Avenue in this restricted garment.  The thing was cruel in its fidelity, though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic.  She followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan’s, who, having just returned from the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of the last cry in Paris modes—­and no model in Mattie’s newly selected stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.