“She’s not strong,” he said.  “She needs care and—­well, to be happy.  That’s up to the three of us.  For one thing, she must not have a shock.  I’m going to warn Dan against exploding paper bags; she goes white every time.”

Dan was at a meeting, and Willy dried the supper dishes for Edith.  She was silent and morose.  Finally she said: 

“She’s not very strong for me, Willy.  You needn’t look so shocked.  She loves Dan and you, but not me.  I don’t mind, you know.  She doesn’t know it, but I do.”

“She is very proud of you.”

“That’s different.  You’re right, though.  Pride’s her middle name.  It nearly killed her at first to take a roomer, because she is always thinking of what the neighbors will say.  That’s why she hates me sometimes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“But it’s true.  That fool Hodge woman at the corner came here one day last winter and filled her up with a lot of talk about me, and she’s been queer to me ever since.”

“You are a very good daughter.”

She eyed him furtively.  If only he wouldn’t always believe in her!  It was almost worse than to have him know the truth.  But he went along with his head in the clouds; all women were good and all men meant well.  Sometimes it worked out; Dan, for instance.  Dan was trying to live up to him.  But it was too late for her.  Forever too late.

It was Willy Cameron’s night off, and they went, the three of them, to the movies that evening.  To Mrs. Boyd the movies was the acme of dissipation.  She would, if warned in advance, spend the entire day with her hair in curlers, and once there she feasted her starved romantic soul to repletion.  But that night the building was stifling, and without any warning Edith suddenly got up and walked toward the door.  There was something odd about her walk and Willy followed her, but she turned on him almost fiercely outside.

“I wish you’d let me alone,” she said, and then swayed a little.  But she did not faint.

“I’m going home,” she said.  “You stay with her.  And for heaven’s sake don’t stare at me like that.  I’m all right.”

Nevertheless he had taken her home, Edith obstinately silent and sullen, and Willy anxious and perplexed.  At the door she said: 

“Now go back to her, and tell her I just got sick of the picture.  It was the smells in that rotten place.  They’d turn a pig’s stomach.”

“I wish you’d see a doctor.”

She looked at him with suspicious eyes.  “If you run Smalley in on me I’ll leave home.”

“Will you go to bed?”

“I’ll go to bed, all right.”

He had found things rather more difficult after that.  Two women, both ill and refusing to acknowledge it, and the prospect of Dan’s being called out by the union.  Try as he would, he could not introduce any habit of thrift into the family.  Dan’s money came and went, and on Saturday nights there was not only nothing left, but often a deficit.  Dan, skillfully worked upon outside, began to develop a grievance, also, and on his rare evenings at home or at the table he would voice his wrongs.