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Updated: June 16, 2025
Answer me, child! Isn't there any one that you care for? Weren't you out with some man?" Rose-Marie was blushing furiously. "No," she admitted, "I wasn't out with a man. I never had any sort of a sweetheart, not ever! I just let you all think that I was with some one because if I hadn't let you think that way you might have made me stay in.
It was the cry of an animal in utter pain in blind, unreasoning agony. Rose-Marie was on her feet at the first moment that it cut, quiveringly, through the air. With eyes distended she whirled about to face a small boy who knelt upon the ground behind her bench. To Rose-Marie the details of the small boy's appearance came back, later, with an amazing clarity.
As they said good-bye, in front of the brownstone stoop of the Settlement House, there was none of the usual restraint that exists between a child and a grown-up. And when Rose-Marie asked Bennie, quite as a matter of course, to come to some of their boys' clubs he assented in a manner as casual as her own.
"Only worse!" he added. Rose-Marie laid down the bit of roll that she had been buttering and turned reproachful eyes upon the Young Doctor. "Oh, but they're not," she cried; "you don't understand, or you wouldn't talk that way. You don't understand!" Quite after the maddening fashion of men the doctor did not answer until he had consumed, and appreciatively, the last of the roll he was eating.
Rose-Marie had a sudden feeling a feeling that she had experienced before that the child was seeing visions, with her great sightless eyes, that other, normal folk could not see. All at once a great dread clutched at her soul. "She's not dying ?" she whispered, gaspingly. "Her smile is so very wonderful. She's not dying?" The Young Doctor turned swiftly from the bed.
"I'll say that she has!" he replied, and his words, though slangy, were very tender. "I'll say that she has!" And then "Are we going back to the little town, Rose-Marie," he questioned. "Are we going back to the little town to be married?" The blush had died from Rose-Marie's face, leaving it just faintly flushed. The eyes that she raised to the Young Doctor's eyes were like warm stars.
But she did not say anything of the sort to Mrs. Volsky Mrs. Volsky would not have been able to understand. Instead she spoke of something else that had lain, for a long time, upon her mind. "Has Lily ever received any medical attention?" she asked abruptly. Mrs. Volsky's face took on lines of blankness. "What say?" she mouthed thickly. "I don' understan'?" Rose-Marie reconstructed her question.
Despite all of the time that she had spent in the Volsky flat, Rose-Marie had never been past the front room with its tumbled heaps of bedding, and its dirt. She was surprised to see that the inner room, shared by Ella and Lily, was exquisitely neat, though tiny. There were no windows the only light came from a rusty gas fixture but Rose-Marie, after months in the slums, was prepared for that.
Jim's laugh rang out heartlessly, eerily, upon the air. "It ain't so terrible!" he told Rose-Marie. "Pa he wasn't no good! He wasn't a reg'lar feller like me." All at once his well-manicured white hand crept down over her hand. "He wasn't a reg'lar feller," he repeated, "like me!" As Rose-Marie left the Volsky flat Ella had begged her to go; had assured her that it would be better to leave Mrs.
And Rose-Marie had seen his bleary eyes pass, without a flicker of interest, over his wife's clean apron and freshly washed hair; had seen him throw his coat and his empty bottle into one of the newly dusted corners, had seen his collapse into a heap in the center of the room.
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