Somehow after all her
years of longing, and all her efforts to make a home like other people,
she had failed lamentably, and she knew it.
"I guess it ain't in me!" she confessed to Milly.
Nevertheless, she kept the vision of it,--the vision she had had through
the swaying muslin curtains of "number 232."
Thus far Ernestine had come when she happened into Milly's life. Only
the merest outline of her strenuous, if monotonous, existence has been
given, and though Ernestine deserves much more,--deserves to be known in
her mind and her feelings, yes, and in her soul,--she must put up, as
she did in life, with getting less than her deserts, and let her rough
actions reveal her nature imperfectly.
X
MILLY'S NEW MARRIAGE
The next morning--it was Sunday--when Ernestine presented herself at the
Reddon flat to inquire in her heavy, grumbling voice for "the little
gurl," Milly had difficulty in recognizing the woman who had offered
Virginia an asylum the night before. Ernestine was now clothed in a
well-cut walking suit of dark blue broadcloth, which became her square
figure much better than the soft folds of the rose-pink negligee. Yet
Milly thought her "quite common," and had a momentary pang, realizing
how she and her daughter had come down in the world when they were
obliged to have such neighbors. But Ernestine Geyer was not "common,"
and Milly, with her quick instinct for personal values, realized it as
soon as she could recover from the shock of the harsh voice and the
ungrammatical idiom.
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