* * * * *
Braiding up her hair she sat gazing at herself in the mirror while her
detached thoughts drifted almost anywhere--back to Spring Pond and
the Hotel Greensleeve, back to her mother, to the child cross-legged
on the floor,--back to her father, and how he sat there dead in his
leather chair;--back to the bar, and the red gleam of the stove, and a
boy and girl in earnest conversation there in the semi-darkness,
eating peach turnovers-She turned her head, leisurely: the electric bell had sounded twice
before she realised that she ought to pull the wire which opened the
street door below.
So she got up, pulled the wire, and then sauntered out into the
sitting-room and set the door ajar, not worrying about her somewhat
intimate costume because it was too late for tradesmen, and there was
nobody else to call on her or on her sisters excepting other girls
known to them all.
The sitting-room seemed chilly. Half listening for the ascending
footsteps and the knocking, partly absorbed in other thoughts, she
seated herself and lay back in the dingy arm-chair, before the
radiator, elevating her dainty feet to the top of it and crossing
them.
A gale was now blowing outside; invisible rain, or more probably
sleet, pelted and swished across the curtained panes. Far away in the
city, somewhere, a fire-engine rushed clanging through canyons,
storm-swept, luminously obscure. Her nickel alarm clock ticked loudly
in the room; the radiator clicked and fizzed and snapped.
Presently she heard a step on the stair, then in the corridor outside
her door. Then came the knocking on the door but unexpectedly loud,
vigorous and impatient.
And Athalie, surprised, twisted around in her chair, looking over her
shoulder at the door.
"Please come in," she said in her calm young voice.