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Updated: May 14, 2025
All of her desire to confide in him died away, as suddenly as it had been born. He was the man who had said that the people who lived in poverty are soulless. He would scoff at the Volskys, and at her desire to help them. Worse than that he might keep her from seeing the Volskys again.
All at once she ceased to be afraid ceased to question the ways of the Almighty. All at once she felt that Lily would get better that the Volskys would be saved to a better life. And all at once she knew something else. And the consciousness of it looked from her wide eyes. "You!" she breathed. "You!"
She went in through the mouth-like tenement door it was no longer frightful to her with a feeling of intense emotion. She climbed the narrow stairs, all five flights of them, with never a pause for breath. And then she was standing, once again, in front of the Volskys' door. She knocked, softly. Everything was apparently very still in the Volsky flat.
She realized, suddenly, that she wanted companionship of her own sort that she longed with all of her soul to chat with some one who did not murder the queen's English, that she wanted to exchange commonplaces about books, and music, and beautiful things things that the Volskys would not understand.
When she left the tenement home of the Volskys she had been exceedingly depressed, when she parted from Bennie at the Settlement House steps she had been ready to cry. But the hours between that parting and dinnertime had brought her a sort of assurance, a sort of joyous bravery. She felt that at last she had found her true vocation, her real place in the sun.
It was her time, then, to admit that there was nobody, really that she had gone out on an adventure by herself, that there had been no "beau." But the consciousness of the Young Doctor's eyes, fixed upon her face, prohibited all speech. She could not tell him about the Volskys neither could she admit that no young man was interested in her.
All up and down the hall came the usual sounds of the house; the stairs echoed with noise. But behind the closed door silence reigned supreme. As Rose-Marie stood there she felt a strange mental chill the chill of her first doubt. Perhaps the Volskys would not want to come with her to the Settlement House, perhaps they would resent her attitude would call it interference.
And as for being kin to the Volskys the idea was quite unthinkable. Always, Rose-Marie had imagined that a proposal of marriage would be the greatest compliment that a man could pay a girl. But the proposal of the man in front of her did not seem in the least complimentary. She realized with the only feeling of irony she had ever known, that this proposal was her very first.
Never again would he slouch drunkenly into the flat, never again would he throw soiled clothing and broken bottles and heavy shoes into newly tidied corners. He was dead and he had after all been the one link that tied the Volskys to their dingy quarters! With Pa gone the family could seek cleaner, sweeter rooms rooms that would have been barred to the family of a drunkard!
There was a mother, and an older sister, and an older brother, and a drunken father, and a little crippled girl...." And then, shaking inwardly, Rose-Marie told the story of the Volskys. She told it well; better than she realized. For the Superintendent's eyes never left her face and at certain parts of the story the Superintendent's cheeks grew girlishly pink.
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