If it had been a generation earlier she could not have lived thus freely. But the times had loosened everyone. The village paper told of strange doings in the great towns, men and women living anyhow, drunkenness and heedlessness. Automobiles began to be built in long flying lines of speed, open to the winds. They raced through the village, full of young men and women going so fast their faces could not be seen. They were blurring lines of scarlet and green and yellow and kingfisher blue, and their hair streamed behind their profiles, sharp against the sky.
One morning old Mrs. Kinney stepped from the curb. Sarah Kinney had run back for a shawl and had been slow, and old Mrs. Kinney had been provoked. She called shrilly, “Sarah, I’m going on!”
She stepped off the curb to punish Sarah, and a car tore by at her left side, threw her and went on. It was a long red car, and all the young faces were turned straight ahead and it did not stop. Miss Kinney, running out, saw no more. She screamed and ran to her mother. Old Mrs. Kinney was lying on the road, dying. But she paused long enough to say with impatience, “You’re always forgetting something.”
“I declare I miss her,” said Dr. Crabbe to Joan at the funeral. “I feel downright cheated. I believe I could have kept her going another ten years.”
Behind her black-gloved hand Miss Kinney whispered excitedly, “I’m going back to Banpu as soon as I can brush up on the language!”
But day after day passed and she did not go. “I shall begin brushing up right away,” she said gaily, and then she forgot and played in the garden among the falling leaves. They made her laugh, falling on her face, on her spraying white hair. She shook her head at them, laughing.
So Joan’s coming and going seemed gentle. Besides, she had been a child there in Middlehope. The old were growing older and they saw her still a child. “Joan will turn out all right in the end,” they said, seeing her still a small girl, wayward for a moment. But she was a woman, making her life out of what she had about her.
When she went into the store for food or clothes or shoes, the clerks greeted her as smoothly as they did another. It was true Ned Parsons was a little wary of her, kind but wary.
“What can I do for you?” He made her nameless. There was no saying “Joan”—it seemed too close now that he had two children. And Netta never quite forgot that he had once been in love with Joan Richards, or very nearly in love. She talked at night in bed against women who left their men.
“Nothing makes it right, I say,” she cried. “I’d feel it my duty to make the best of it.” She hinted against Joan. “There’s things about her I’ve never told even you — her and Martin Bradley.”
He said mildly. “I thought Martin was sweet on you once.”
But she screamed at him out of the darkness. “Me? No, thank you! I wouldn’t have married Martin Bradley if he was the last man on earth. I wouldn’t touch him or let him touch me — he gives me the creeps — always did, too! I never did understand Joan Richards—”
But Netta talked against women. She’d talk against his own sister. “There’s Emily — she’s got a good job in the city, works on a newspaper. She hasn’t anybody except herself. You’d think she’d sent Petie something. She didn’t even write when little Louise was born — People are so selfish.”
He listened. Netta talked so much. He couldn’t answer everything. He had stopped answering her years ago. His mother had been such a quiet woman, smiling and dreaming and writing her stories. They used to think her silly when they were growing up. He was glad now he had not been quite so impatient as Emily had been. Emily had said to her mother, “I don’t see how you can expect any publisher to take such drivel as you write.” But Emily was always on their father’s side. She’d get angry when they came home from school and dinner wasn’t ready and their father would be puttering distractedly about the stove, and their mother’s voice would drift down from the attic, “I’ll be right down.” But very often she wasn’t right down and Emily was angry and left home as soon as she could get a job. It seemed she was all the angrier because she herself secretly wanted to write stories and couldn’t be happy at anything else, though she always made fun of it.
But his mother never seemed to know Emily was angry. She was always quiet, thinking and smiling to herself and saying, “I really think I’ve got it this time.” A quiet woman was nice in the house …
“I’d like to see some clear blue gingham,” said Joan’s cheerful voice. Joan always had a lovely rushing voice.
“Let’s see. Netta’s just made some dresses for Louise out of this.”
“You’ve never seen my Mary’s eyes!” Joan’s voice was like laughter. “There — that sky color!” She looked just as she used to, a little heavier maybe, but she was tall. Netta was growing thinner all the time. Netta boasted, “Joan Richards — there, I forget all the time she’s married — Joan Pounder’s hair’s getting real gray. I haven’t a gray hair myself. I take after my mother. She hasn’t a gray hair at sixty!”
Joan’s smooth rosy face under soft early-graying hair — He tied up the bundle of blue gingham. “Here you are,” he said abruptly. “Anything else?”
“No, thank you, Ned!” Her voice was like singing and she walked out of the store as though she were dancing.
Ned’s getting bald, Joan thought, the blue gingham under her arm. He looks dyspeptic. I wonder if Netta’s a good cook? She thought a little tenderly of Ned’s pimpled young face, yearning at her over a guitar. It seemed very long ago. He would be ashamed now if he knew she remembered him thus. But so he had been and it made a small memory, precious, too, in its way. Everything in life that was her own now was precious. She had used to plan so much for the future, to want everything. Now she wanted only to sort out of the world that which was her own. She had only lived in Middlehope. She heard of strikes and ferment outside, of hunger marchers, of men jailed for discontent too freely spoken. A turn outward, at a moment, and she might have been one of them. But she had made the inward turn.
She was drawing near to the house and now she saw someone sitting on the stone steps of the little porch. She had left David at home to watch Mary and Paul, but this was not David. She came nearer and it was Frankie. He was sitting quietly and compactly, waiting for her, his hands in his pockets. The winter air was biting cold. She hurried toward him. “Why, Frankie!” She had not seen him in months. Fanny had come and gone irregularly. She had been away working, she said, and had taken Frank with her. She had not been to get her money for nearly a month. “Why didn’t you go in, Frankie?”
“Your boy told me to, ma’am, but I thought I’d rather wait here.”
He had grown a great deal. He was much taller than David, tall and strong, brown-skinned, dark eyes madly lashed. But his lips were like her father’s lips, purely, coldly set into the round soft oval of his face. His body was not lean and angular as David’s was. It was soft-limbed, lightly fleshed. She looked him over swiftly.
“I thought I gave Fanny money to get you some new clothes!” The boy was completely out of his clothes, his hands dangling out of his short sleeves, his trousers tight about his legs.
“I haven’t seen her, ma’am — not in a mighty long time. She went away and left us.”
“Where did she go?”
“She said she was going to New York to get a job. The factory’s closed again, ma’am. There’s a strike on again, and they aren’t going to take back any colored hands. Lem stayed a week and a day or two and he went to get a job at the pants factory in Newville he heard was looking for help.”