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Snawdor shook her head impatiently. "I didn't, an' I ain't goin' to! That there Ike Lavinski ain't goin' to run me! He took my Fidy off to that there pest-house where I bet they operate her. He'll pay up fer this, you see if he don't!" She began to cry, but as Nance was too much occupied to give audience to her grief, she betook herself to the first floor to assist in the care of Mrs. Smelts.
"Not yet." "Lots of changes since the old days. Mr. Snawdor and Fidy and Mrs. Smelts and Mr. Demry all gone. Have you heard about Mr. Demry?" Dan shook his head. He was not listening to her, but he was looking at her searchingly, broodingly, with growing insistence. The hammering of the type-writer was the only sound that broke the ensuing pause.
One night we had a difference not a quarrel, mind you, but a difference. He was for lynchin' a fellow called Piccadilly, a swell that'd come down in the world, bringin' the worst tricks of his tribe with him. He'd never been a bony fidy gentleman just an imitation. He played sneak with the daughter of Five Fingers, an Injin chief. We'd set store by that girl.
Just what her being kept at home cost the other children was never reckoned. "Well, I'll take care of her on one condition," stipulated Nance. "You got to keep Lobelia at school. It ain't fair for her to have to stay home to nurse Fidy." "Well, if she goes to school, she's got to work at night. You was doin' your two hours at Lavinski's long before you was her age." "I don't care if I was.
In fact her spirit did not break until she was subjected to a thorough scrubbing from head to foot, and put to bed on a long porch between cold, clean sheets. She was used to sleeping in her underclothes in the hot close air of Snawdor's flat, with Fidy and Lobelia snuggled up on each side. This icy isolation was intolerable!
I've seen her picter; but good land! how can I tell who or what it is? It is pretty as a doll, and Krit seems to think his eyes on it; but he's so full of fun, I can't git any straight story out of him. But Thomas Jefferson says she is a bonny fidy girl a good one and a pretty one, and has got a father dretful well off; and he sez that she and Krit are engaged.
Even when Fidy Yager, who "wasn't all there," and who, according to her mother, had "a fit a minute," was carried away to the pest-house, nobody was particularly alarmed. But when, twenty-four hours later, Mr. Snawdor and one of the Lavinski helpers came down with it, the alley began to look serious, and Mrs. Snawdor sent for Nance.
"She ain't no charity lady!" said Nance indignantly. "Me an' her's friends. She said we was." "What's she goin' to give Dan?" asked Fidy, to whom personages from the upper world were interesting only when they bore gifts in their hands. "She ain't givin' him nothin', Silly! She's lettin' him help her. He gits a quarter a hour, an' his dinner fer wheelin' Mr. Walter in the park." "They say Mr.
Mr. Snawdor, Fidy Yager, Mrs. Smelts, and a dozen others, being the unfittest to survive, had paid the price of enlightenment. One sultry July night four years later Dr. Isaac Lavinski, now an arrogant member of the staff at the Adair Hospital, paused on his last round of the wards and cocked an inquiring ear above the steps that led to the basement.
But after the medicine had been bought, and Fidy had grown quiet under its influence, Nance went across the hall to her own cold, barren room and flung herself across her narrow bed. The last chance of seeing the play had vanished. The only light of hope that had shone on her horizon for months had gone out.
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