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The Volsky family presented to her a very genuine challenge. She glanced, covertly, at the Young Doctor. He was eating soup, and no man is at his best while eating soup. And yet as she watched him, she considered very seriously whether she should tell him of her adventure.
Rose-Marie waited, for a moment, and then as Ella did not speak she got up from her place beside the suit-case, and going to the dividing door, opened it softly. The room was as she had left it. Mrs. Volsky was still bending above the tubs, Lily was standing in almost the same place in which she had been left.
She tried, hurriedly and with a great scare looking out of her wide eyes to repair the mistake that she had made. "I don't mean that I am better than you, Jim," she said softly, "not in the matter of family. We are all the children of God we are all brothers and sisters in His sight." Jim Volsky interrupted.
The Superintendent, left alone at the table, rang for the maid. Her voice was carefully calm as she ordered the evening meal. But her eyes were just a bit misty as she looked into the maid's dull face. "Mrs. Volsky," she said suddenly, "love must have its way! And love is " The maid looked at her blankly. Obviously she did not understand.
Almost instinctively the eyes of Rose-Marie travelled past the figure of Mrs. Volsky. There was nothing in that figure to hold her gaze it was so vague, so like a shadow of something that had been. She saw the few broken chairs, the half-filled wash tub, the dish-pan with its freight of soiled cups and plates.
"Be it ever so humble," the old song tells us, "be it ever so humble ..." And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to find a home. She expected it to be humble in the truest sense of the word to be ragged and poverty-stricken and mean. And yet she could not feel that it would be utterly divorced from the ideals she had always built around her conception of the word.
Ella, her mouth agonized and drawn, was the first to speak after Bennie left the room. When she did speak she asked a question. "Who done this t' her?" she questioned. "Who done it?" Rose-Marie hesitated. She could feel the eyes of Mrs. Volsky, dumb with suffering, upon her she could feel Jim's rat-like gaze fixed, with a certain appeal, on her face. At last she spoke.
But Rose-Marie had noticed that there were no unwashed dishes lying in the tub that the corners of the room had had some of the grime of months swept out of them. When Ella Volsky came suddenly into the flat, with lips compressed, and a high colour, Rose-Marie had been glowingly conscious of her start of surprise.
The room seemed full of people shouting, gesticulating people. And in the foreground was Jim as sleek and well groomed as ever. Of all the crowd he seemed the only one who was composed. In front of him stood Mrs. Volsky her face drawn and white, her hands clasped in a way that was singularly and primitively appealing. At first Rose-Marie thought that the commotion had to do with Jim.
She spoke to him in a cool little voice that belied her inward disturbance. "Where," she questioned, "are your mother and Ella? I want to see them." With a movement that was not ungraceful Jim flung wide the door. Indeed, Rose-Marie told herself, as she stepped into the Volsky flat, Jim was never ungraceful.
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