“What a nice Sunday,” Phoebe had said, looking out at the window.  “Jenny,” she continued to her roommate, “I have a feeling I’d like to go to church this morning....”

Jenny had thought that was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....

Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it being Sunday morning.  She’d bring in a Sunday paper, too.

When she returned, Phoebe didn’t seem to be in the room.  Jenny felt that something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....

She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....

She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed.  Her eyes were rolled back to the whites from agony.  A creamy froth was on her mouth.  And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.

Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name—­loud....  “Phoebe, why don’t you speak to me!” Took her head in her lap and it only lolled.  Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole house up.  And the madame had shouted: 

“Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone’s gettin’ killed?  Ain’t we in bad enough already?”

“So Phoebe came to a bad end,” commented Lan, “as we always thought she would.”

* * * * *

The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon: 

Once, in the night, during my week’s stay with him, I stepped from bed, sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay.  Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him through the heart with.

But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave me a bump as big as a hen’s egg, into the bargain.

The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.

“—­that you, Johnnie?” called my uncle.

“Yep!”

“What’s the matter? can’t you sleep?”

“No!—­got up to take a drink of water.”

“You’ll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating in it ... and there’s matches on the stand by your bed.”  A pause.  He continued:  “You must of run into something.  I heard a bang.”

“I did.  I bumped my head into the door.”

* * * * *

I visited Aunt Millie last.

I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall.  Her cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as ever.  But she had become a different woman since she had married.