1 files changed, 3912 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/311.txt b/311.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f4ca144
--- /dev/null
+++ b/311.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3912 @@
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Bunner Sisters
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Release Date: July 1, 2008 [EBook #311]
+[Last updated: August 27, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUNNER SISTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+BUNNER SISTERS
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+Scribner's Magazine 60 (Oct. 1916): 439-58; 60 (Nov. 1916): 575-96.
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping
+horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of
+Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls
+of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a
+single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine
+population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.
+
+It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street
+already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the
+window-pane, and the brevity of the sign surmounting it (merely "Bunner
+Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black ground) it would have been difficult
+for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried
+on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so
+purely local that the customers on whom its existence depended were
+almost congenitally aware of the exact range of "goods" to be found at
+Bunner Sisters'.
+
+The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private
+dwelling with a brick front, green shutters on weak hinges, and a
+dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. On each side of its
+modest three stories stood higher buildings, with fronts of brown stone,
+cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches
+behind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now
+a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced
+itself, above the knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as
+the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster
+of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its
+curtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel
+were not exacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in
+as much fastidiousness as they could afford to pay for, and rather more
+than their landlord thought they had a right to express.
+
+These three houses fairly exemplified the general character of the
+street, which, as it stretched eastward, rapidly fell from shabbiness to
+squalor, with an increasing frequency of projecting sign-boards, and of
+swinging doors that softly shut or opened at the touch of red-nosed men
+and pale little girls with broken jugs. The middle of the street was
+full of irregular depressions, well adapted to retain the long swirls of
+dust and straw and twisted paper that the wind drove up and down its sad
+untended length; and toward the end of the day, when traffic had been
+active, the fissured pavement formed a mosaic of coloured hand-bills,
+lids of tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins, cemented
+together by a layer of mud, or veiled in a powdering of dust, as the
+state of the weather determined.
+
+The sole refuge offered from the contemplation of this depressing waste
+was the sight of the Bunner Sisters' window. Its panes were always
+well-washed, and though their display of artificial flowers, bands of
+scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-made preserves, had
+the undefinable greyish tinge of objects long preserved in the show-case
+of a museum, the window revealed a background of orderly counters and
+white-washed walls in pleasant contrast to the adjoining dinginess.
+
+The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content
+with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it
+would be, but though it presented but a shrunken image of their earlier
+ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent and keep themselves alive
+and out of debt; and it was long since their hopes had soared higher.
+
+Now and then, however, among their greyer hours there came one not
+bright enough to be called sunny, but rather of the silvery twilight hue
+which sometimes ends a day of storm. It was such an hour that Ann Eliza,
+the elder of the firm, was soberly enjoying as she sat one January
+evening in the back room which served as bedroom, kitchen and parlour
+to herself and her sister Evelina. In the shop the blinds had been drawn
+down, the counters cleared and the wares in the window lightly covered
+with an old sheet; but the shop-door remained unlocked till Evelina, who
+had taken a parcel to the dyer's, should come back.
+
+In the back room a kettle bubbled on the stove, and Ann Eliza had laid a
+cloth over one end of the centre table, and placed near the green-shaded
+sewing lamp two tea-cups, two plates, a sugar-bowl and a piece of pie.
+The rest of the room remained in a greenish shadow which discreetly
+veiled the outline of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead surmounted by a
+chromo of a young lady in a night-gown who clung with eloquently-rolling
+eyes to a crag described in illuminated letters as the Rock of Ages;
+and against the unshaded windows two rocking-chairs and a sewing-machine
+were silhouetted on the dusk.
+
+Ann Eliza, her small and habitually anxious face smoothed to unusual
+serenity, and the streaks of pale hair on her veined temples shining
+glossily beneath the lamp, had seated herself at the table, and was
+tying up, with her usual fumbling deliberation, a knobby object wrapped
+in paper. Now and then, as she struggled with the string, which was too
+short, she fancied she heard the click of the shop-door, and paused
+to listen for her sister; then, as no one came, she straightened her
+spectacles and entered into renewed conflict with the parcel. In honour
+of some event of obvious importance, she had put on her double-dyed and
+triple-turned black silk. Age, while bestowing on this garment a patine
+worthy of a Renaissance bronze, had deprived it of whatever curves the
+wearer's pre-Raphaelite figure had once been able to impress on it;
+but this stiffness of outline gave it an air of sacerdotal state which
+seemed to emphasize the importance of the occasion.
+
+Seen thus, in her sacramental black silk, a wisp of lace turned over
+the collar and fastened by a mosaic brooch, and her face smoothed into
+harmony with her apparel, Ann Eliza looked ten years younger than behind
+the counter, in the heat and burden of the day. It would have been as
+difficult to guess her approximate age as that of the black silk, for
+she had the same worn and glossy aspect as her dress; but a faint tinge
+of pink still lingered on her cheek-bones, like the reflection of sunset
+which sometimes colours the west long after the day is over.
+
+When she had tied the parcel to her satisfaction, and laid it with
+furtive accuracy just opposite her sister's plate, she sat down, with an
+air of obviously-assumed indifference, in one of the rocking-chairs near
+the window; and a moment later the shop-door opened and Evelina entered.
+
+The younger Bunner sister, who was a little taller than her elder, had
+a more pronounced nose, but a weaker slope of mouth and chin. She still
+permitted herself the frivolity of waving her pale hair, and its
+tight little ridges, stiff as the tresses of an Assyrian statue,
+were flattened under a dotted veil which ended at the tip of her
+cold-reddened nose. In her scant jacket and skirt of black cashmere she
+looked singularly nipped and faded; but it seemed possible that under
+happier conditions she might still warm into relative youth.
+
+"Why, Ann Eliza," she exclaimed, in a thin voice pitched to chronic
+fretfulness, "what in the world you got your best silk on for?"
+
+Ann Eliza had risen with a blush that made her steel-browed spectacles
+incongruous.
+
+"Why, Evelina, why shouldn't I, I sh'ld like to know? Ain't it your
+birthday, dear?" She put out her arms with the awkwardness of habitually
+repressed emotion.
+
+Evelina, without seeming to notice the gesture, threw back the jacket
+from her narrow shoulders.
+
+"Oh, pshaw," she said, less peevishly. "I guess we'd better give up
+birthdays. Much as we can do to keep Christmas nowadays."
+
+"You hadn't oughter say that, Evelina. We ain't so badly off as all
+that. I guess you're cold and tired. Set down while I take the kettle
+off: it's right on the boil."
+
+She pushed Evelina toward the table, keeping a sideward eye on her
+sister's listless movements, while her own hands were busy with the
+kettle. A moment later came the exclamation for which she waited.
+
+"Why, Ann Eliza!" Evelina stood transfixed by the sight of the parcel
+beside her plate.
+
+Ann Eliza, tremulously engaged in filling the teapot, lifted a look of
+hypocritical surprise.
+
+"Sakes, Evelina! What's the matter?"
+
+The younger sister had rapidly untied the string, and drawn from
+its wrappings a round nickel clock of the kind to be bought for a
+dollar-seventy-five.
+
+"Oh, Ann Eliza, how could you?" She set the clock down, and the sisters
+exchanged agitated glances across the table.
+
+"Well," the elder retorted, "AIN'T it your birthday?"
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"Well, and ain't you had to run round the corner to the Square every
+morning, rain or shine, to see what time it was, ever since we had to
+sell mother's watch last July? Ain't you, Evelina?"
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"There ain't any buts. We've always wanted a clock and now we've got
+one: that's all there is about it. Ain't she a beauty, Evelina?" Ann
+Eliza, putting back the kettle on the stove, leaned over her sister's
+shoulder to pass an approving hand over the circular rim of the clock.
+"Hear how loud she ticks. I was afraid you'd hear her soon as you come
+in."
+
+"No. I wasn't thinking," murmured Evelina.
+
+"Well, ain't you glad now?" Ann Eliza gently reproached her. The rebuke
+had no acerbity, for she knew that Evelina's seeming indifference was
+alive with unexpressed scruples.
+
+"I'm real glad, sister; but you hadn't oughter. We could have got on
+well enough without."
+
+"Evelina Bunner, just you sit down to your tea. I guess I know what
+I'd oughter and what I'd hadn't oughter just as well as you do--I'm old
+enough!"
+
+"You're real good, Ann Eliza; but I know you've given up something you
+needed to get me this clock."
+
+"What do I need, I'd like to know? Ain't I got a best black silk?" the
+elder sister said with a laugh full of nervous pleasure.
+
+She poured out Evelina's tea, adding some condensed milk from the jug,
+and cutting for her the largest slice of pie; then she drew up her own
+chair to the table.
+
+The two women ate in silence for a few moments before Evelina began to
+speak again. "The clock is perfectly lovely and I don't say it ain't a
+comfort to have it; but I hate to think what it must have cost you."
+
+"No, it didn't, neither," Ann Eliza retorted. "I got it dirt cheap, if
+you want to know. And I paid for it out of a little extra work I did the
+other night on the machine for Mrs. Hawkins."
+
+"The baby-waists?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There, I knew it! You swore to me you'd buy a new pair of shoes with
+that money."
+
+"Well, and s'posin' I didn't want 'em--what then? I've patched up the
+old ones as good as new--and I do declare, Evelina Bunner, if you ask me
+another question you'll go and spoil all my pleasure."
+
+"Very well, I won't," said the younger sister.
+
+They continued to eat without farther words. Evelina yielded to her
+sister's entreaty that she should finish the pie, and poured out a
+second cup of tea, into which she put the last lump of sugar; and
+between them, on the table, the clock kept up its sociable tick.
+
+"Where'd you get it, Ann Eliza?" asked Evelina, fascinated.
+
+"Where'd you s'pose? Why, right round here, over acrost the Square, in
+the queerest little store you ever laid eyes on. I saw it in the window
+as I was passing, and I stepped right in and asked how much it was, and
+the store-keeper he was real pleasant about it. He was just the nicest
+man. I guess he's a German. I told him I couldn't give much, and he
+said, well, he knew what hard times was too. His name's Ramy--Herman
+Ramy: I saw it written up over the store. And he told me he used to work
+at Tiff'ny's, oh, for years, in the clock-department, and three years
+ago he took sick with some kinder fever, and lost his place, and when
+he got well they'd engaged somebody else and didn't want him, and so he
+started this little store by himself. I guess he's real smart, and he
+spoke quite like an educated man--but he looks sick."
+
+Evelina was listening with absorbed attention. In the narrow lives of
+the two sisters such an episode was not to be under-rated.
+
+"What you say his name was?" she asked as Ann Eliza paused.
+
+"Herman Ramy."
+
+"How old is he?"
+
+"Well, I couldn't exactly tell you, he looked so sick--but I don't
+b'lieve he's much over forty."
+
+By this time the plates had been cleared and the teapot emptied, and
+the two sisters rose from the table. Ann Eliza, tying an apron over
+her black silk, carefully removed all traces of the meal; then, after
+washing the cups and plates, and putting them away in a cupboard, she
+drew her rocking-chair to the lamp and sat down to a heap of mending.
+Evelina, meanwhile, had been roaming about the room in search of
+an abiding-place for the clock. A rosewood what-not with ornamental
+fret-work hung on the wall beside the devout young lady in dishabille,
+and after much weighing of alternatives the sisters decided to dethrone
+a broken china vase filled with dried grasses which had long stood
+on the top shelf, and to put the clock in its place; the vase, after
+farther consideration, being relegated to a small table covered with
+blue and white beadwork, which held a Bible and prayer-book, and an
+illustrated copy of Longfellow's poems given as a school-prize to their
+father.
+
+This change having been made, and the effect studied from every angle
+of the room, Evelina languidly put her pinking-machine on the table,
+and sat down to the monotonous work of pinking a heap of black silk
+flounces. The strips of stuff slid slowly to the floor at her side, and
+the clock, from its commanding altitude, kept time with the dispiriting
+click of the instrument under her fingers.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The purchase of Evelina's clock had been a more important event in the
+life of Ann Eliza Bunner than her younger sister could divine. In the
+first place, there had been the demoralizing satisfaction of finding
+herself in possession of a sum of money which she need not put into the
+common fund, but could spend as she chose, without consulting Evelina,
+and then the excitement of her stealthy trips abroad, undertaken on the
+rare occasions when she could trump up a pretext for leaving the shop;
+since, as a rule, it was Evelina who took the bundles to the dyer's,
+and delivered the purchases of those among their customers who were too
+genteel to be seen carrying home a bonnet or a bundle of pinking--so
+that, had it not been for the excuse of having to see Mrs. Hawkins's
+teething baby, Ann Eliza would hardly have known what motive to allege
+for deserting her usual seat behind the counter.
+
+The infrequency of her walks made them the chief events of her life.
+The mere act of going out from the monastic quiet of the shop into the
+tumult of the streets filled her with a subdued excitement which grew
+too intense for pleasure as she was swallowed by the engulfing roar
+of Broadway or Third Avenue, and began to do timid battle with their
+incessant cross-currents of humanity. After a glance or two into the
+great show-windows she usually allowed herself to be swept back into the
+shelter of a side-street, and finally regained her own roof in a state
+of breathless bewilderment and fatigue; but gradually, as her nerves
+were soothed by the familiar quiet of the little shop, and the click
+of Evelina's pinking-machine, certain sights and sounds would detach
+themselves from the torrent along which she had been swept, and she
+would devote the rest of the day to a mental reconstruction of the
+different episodes of her walk, till finally it took shape in her
+thought as a consecutive and highly-coloured experience, from which, for
+weeks afterwards, she would detach some fragmentary recollection in the
+course of her long dialogues with her sister.
+
+But when, to the unwonted excitement of going out, was added the
+intenser interest of looking for a present for Evelina, Ann Eliza's
+agitation, sharpened by concealment, actually preyed upon her rest;
+and it was not till the present had been given, and she had unbosomed
+herself of the experiences connected with its purchase, that she could
+look back with anything like composure to that stirring moment of
+her life. From that day forward, however, she began to take a certain
+tranquil pleasure in thinking of Mr. Ramy's small shop, not unlike her
+own in its countrified obscurity, though the layer of dust which
+covered its counter and shelves made the comparison only superficially
+acceptable. Still, she did not judge the state of the shop severely, for
+Mr. Ramy had told her that he was alone in the world, and lone men, she
+was aware, did not know how to deal with dust. It gave her a good deal
+of occupation to wonder why he had never married, or if, on the other
+hand, he were a widower, and had lost all his dear little children;
+and she scarcely knew which alternative seemed to make him the more
+interesting. In either case, his life was assuredly a sad one; and she
+passed many hours in speculating on the manner in which he probably
+spent his evenings. She knew he lived at the back of his shop, for she
+had caught, on entering, a glimpse of a dingy room with a tumbled bed;
+and the pervading smell of cold fry suggested that he probably did his
+own cooking. She wondered if he did not often make his tea with water
+that had not boiled, and asked herself, almost jealously, who looked
+after the shop while he went to market. Then it occurred to her as
+likely that he bought his provisions at the same market as Evelina;
+and she was fascinated by the thought that he and her sister might
+constantly be meeting in total unconsciousness of the link between them.
+Whenever she reached this stage in her reflexions she lifted a furtive
+glance to the clock, whose loud staccato tick was becoming a part of her
+inmost being.
+
+The seed sown by these long hours of meditation germinated at last in
+the secret wish to go to market some morning in Evelina's stead. As
+this purpose rose to the surface of Ann Eliza's thoughts she shrank back
+shyly from its contemplation. A plan so steeped in duplicity had never
+before taken shape in her crystalline soul. How was it possible for her
+to consider such a step? And, besides, (she did not possess sufficient
+logic to mark the downward trend of this "besides"), what excuse could
+she make that would not excite her sister's curiosity? From this second
+query it was an easy descent to the third: how soon could she manage to
+go?
+
+It was Evelina herself, who furnished the necessary pretext by awaking
+with a sore throat on the day when she usually went to market. It was
+a Saturday, and as they always had their bit of steak on Sunday the
+expedition could not be postponed, and it seemed natural that Ann Eliza,
+as she tied an old stocking around Evelina's throat, should announce her
+intention of stepping round to the butcher's.
+
+"Oh, Ann Eliza, they'll cheat you so," her sister wailed.
+
+Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few minutes
+later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last glance at the
+shop, she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling haste.
+
+The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds that
+would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an occasional
+snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its meanest and most
+neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly troubled by any untidiness
+for which she was not responsible, it seemed to wear a singularly
+friendly aspect.
+
+A few minutes' walk brought her to the market where Evelina made her
+purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical fitness, Mr.
+Ramy must also deal.
+
+Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato-barrels and
+flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-aproned butcher who
+stood in the background cutting chops.
+
+As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales, blood and
+saw-dust, he laid aside his cleaver and not unsympathetically asked:
+"Sister sick?"
+
+"Oh, not very--jest a cold," she answered, as guiltily as if Evelina's
+illness had been feigned. "We want a steak as usual, please--and my
+sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as good a cut as if it
+was her," she added with child-like candour.
+
+"Oh, that's all right." The butcher picked up his weapon with a grin.
+"Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us," he remarked.
+
+In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut and
+wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed steps
+toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by such
+conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a deaf old
+lady in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her opportunity.
+
+"Wait on her first, please," Ann Eliza whispered. "I ain't in any
+hurry."
+
+The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza, palpitating in
+the back of the shop, saw that the old lady's hesitations between liver
+and pork chops were likely to be indefinitely prolonged. They were still
+unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy
+Irish girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary
+diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently as
+intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on
+returning to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing
+anew, with an anxious appeal to the butcher's arbitration, the relative
+advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the
+intrusion on them of two or three other customers, were of no avail,
+for Mr. Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and at last Ann
+Eliza, ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed her steak, and
+walked home through the thickening snow.
+
+Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain, and in
+the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions she wondered
+how she could have been foolish enough to suppose that, even if Mr. Ramy
+DID go to that particular market, he would hit on the same day and hour
+as herself.
+
+
+There followed a colourless week unmarked by farther incident. The old
+stocking cured Evelina's throat, and Mrs. Hawkins dropped in once or
+twice to talk of her baby's teeth; some new orders for pinking were
+received, and Evelina sold a bonnet to the lady with puffed sleeves. The
+lady with puffed sleeves--a resident of "the Square," whose name they
+had never learned, because she always carried her own parcels home--was
+the most distinguished and interesting figure on their horizon. She was
+youngish, she was elegant (as the title they had given her implied), and
+she had a sweet sad smile about which they had woven many histories; but
+even the news of her return to town--it was her first apparition
+that year--failed to arouse Ann Eliza's interest. All the small daily
+happenings which had once sufficed to fill the hours now appeared to her
+in their deadly insignificance; and for the first time in her long years
+of drudgery she rebelled at the dullness of her life. With Evelina such
+fits of discontent were habitual and openly proclaimed, and Ann Eliza
+still excused them as one of the prerogatives of youth. Besides, Evelina
+had not been intended by Providence to pine in such a narrow life: in
+the original plan of things, she had been meant to marry and have a
+baby, to wear silk on Sundays, and take a leading part in a Church
+circle. Hitherto opportunity had played her false; and for all her
+superior aspirations and carefully crimped hair she had remained as
+obscure and unsought as Ann Eliza. But the elder sister, who had long
+since accepted her own fate, had never accepted Evelina's. Once a
+pleasant young man who taught in Sunday-school had paid the younger
+Miss Bunner a few shy visits. That was years since, and he had speedily
+vanished from their view. Whether he had carried with him any of
+Evelina's illusions, Ann Eliza had never discovered; but his attentions
+had clad her sister in a halo of exquisite possibilities.
+
+Ann Eliza, in those days, had never dreamed of allowing herself the
+luxury of self-pity: it seemed as much a personal right of Evelina's as
+her elaborately crinkled hair. But now she began to transfer to herself
+a portion of the sympathy she had so long bestowed on Evelina. She had
+at last recognized her right to set up some lost opportunities of her
+own; and once that dangerous precedent established, they began to crowd
+upon her memory.
+
+It was at this stage of Ann Eliza's transformation that Evelina, looking
+up one evening from her work, said suddenly: "My! She's stopped."
+
+Ann Eliza, raising her eyes from a brown merino seam, followed her
+sister's glance across the room. It was a Monday, and they always wound
+the clock on Sundays.
+
+"Are you sure you wound her yesterday, Evelina?"
+
+"Jest as sure as I live. She must be broke. I'll go and see."
+
+Evelina laid down the hat she was trimming, and took the clock from its
+shelf.
+
+"There--I knew it! She's wound jest as TIGHT--what you suppose's
+happened to her, Ann Eliza?"
+
+"I dunno, I'm sure," said the elder sister, wiping her spectacles before
+proceeding to a close examination of the clock.
+
+With anxiously bent heads the two women shook and turned it, as though
+they were trying to revive a living thing; but it remained unresponsive
+to their touch, and at length Evelina laid it down with a sigh.
+
+"Seems like somethin' DEAD, don't it, Ann Eliza? How still the room is!"
+
+"Yes, ain't it?"
+
+"Well, I'll put her back where she belongs," Evelina continued, in the
+tone of one about to perform the last offices for the departed. "And I
+guess," she added, "you'll have to step round to Mr. Ramy's to-morrow,
+and see if he can fix her."
+
+Ann Eliza's face burned. "I--yes, I guess I'll have to," she stammered,
+stooping to pick up a spool of cotton which had rolled to the floor. A
+sudden heart-throb stretched the seams of her flat alpaca bosom, and a
+pulse leapt to life in each of her temples.
+
+That night, long after Evelina slept, Ann Eliza lay awake in the
+unfamiliar silence, more acutely conscious of the nearness of the
+crippled clock than when it had volubly told out the minutes. The next
+morning she woke from a troubled dream of having carried it to Mr.
+Ramy's, and found that he and his shop had vanished; and all through the
+day's occupations the memory of this dream oppressed her.
+
+It had been agreed that Ann Eliza should take the clock to be repaired
+as soon as they had dined; but while they were still at table a
+weak-eyed little girl in a black apron stabbed with innumerable pins
+burst in on them with the cry: "Oh, Miss Bunner, for mercy's sake! Miss
+Mellins has been took again."
+
+Miss Mellins was the dress-maker upstairs, and the weak-eyed child one
+of her youthful apprentices.
+
+Ann Eliza started from her seat. "I'll come at once. Quick, Evelina, the
+cordial!"
+
+By this euphemistic name the sisters designated a bottle of cherry
+brandy, the last of a dozen inherited from their grandmother, which they
+kept locked in their cupboard against such emergencies. A moment later,
+cordial in hand, Ann Eliza was hurrying upstairs behind the weak-eyed
+child.
+
+Miss Mellins' "turn" was sufficiently serious to detain Ann Eliza for
+nearly two hours, and dusk had fallen when she took up the depleted
+bottle of cordial and descended again to the shop. It was empty, as
+usual, and Evelina sat at her pinking-machine in the back room. Ann
+Eliza was still agitated by her efforts to restore the dress-maker, but
+in spite of her preoccupation she was struck, as soon as she entered, by
+the loud tick of the clock, which still stood on the shelf where she had
+left it.
+
+"Why, she's going!" she gasped, before Evelina could question her about
+Miss Mellins. "Did she start up again by herself?"
+
+"Oh, no; but I couldn't stand not knowing what time it was, I've got so
+accustomed to having her round; and just after you went upstairs Mrs.
+Hawkins dropped in, so I asked her to tend the store for a minute, and
+I clapped on my things and ran right round to Mr. Ramy's. It turned out
+there wasn't anything the matter with her--nothin' on'y a speck of dust
+in the works--and he fixed her for me in a minute and I brought her
+right back. Ain't it lovely to hear her going again? But tell me about
+Miss Mellins, quick!"
+
+For a moment Ann Eliza found no words. Not till she learned that she had
+missed her chance did she understand how many hopes had hung upon
+it. Even now she did not know why she had wanted so much to see the
+clock-maker again.
+
+"I s'pose it's because nothing's ever happened to me," she thought, with
+a twinge of envy for the fate which gave Evelina every opportunity
+that came their way. "She had the Sunday-school teacher too," Ann
+Eliza murmured to herself; but she was well-trained in the arts of
+renunciation, and after a scarcely perceptible pause she plunged into a
+detailed description of the dress-maker's "turn."
+
+Evelina, when her curiosity was roused, was an insatiable questioner,
+and it was supper-time before she had come to the end of her enquiries
+about Miss Mellins; but when the two sisters had seated themselves at
+their evening meal Ann Eliza at last found a chance to say: "So she on'y
+had a speck of dust in her."
+
+Evelina understood at once that the reference was not to Miss Mellins.
+"Yes--at least he thinks so," she answered, helping herself as a matter
+of course to the first cup of tea.
+
+"On'y to think!" murmured Ann Eliza.
+
+"But he isn't SURE," Evelina continued, absently pushing the teapot
+toward her sister. "It may be something wrong with the--I forget what he
+called it. Anyhow, he said he'd call round and see, day after to-morrow,
+after supper."
+
+"Who said?" gasped Ann Eliza.
+
+"Why, Mr. Ramy, of course. I think he's real nice, Ann Eliza. And I
+don't believe he's forty; but he DOES look sick. I guess he's pretty
+lonesome, all by himself in that store. He as much as told me so, and
+somehow"--Evelina paused and bridled--"I kinder thought that maybe his
+saying he'd call round about the clock was on'y just an excuse. He said
+it just as I was going out of the store. What you think, Ann Eliza?"
+
+"Oh, I don't har'ly know." To save herself, Ann Eliza could produce
+nothing warmer.
+
+"Well, I don't pretend to be smarter than other folks," said Evelina,
+putting a conscious hand to her hair, "but I guess Mr. Herman Ramy
+wouldn't be sorry to pass an evening here, 'stead of spending it all
+alone in that poky little place of his."
+
+Her self-consciousness irritated Ann Eliza.
+
+"I guess he's got plenty of friends of his own," she said, almost
+harshly.
+
+"No, he ain't, either. He's got hardly any."
+
+"Did he tell you that too?" Even to her own ears there was a faint sneer
+in the interrogation.
+
+"Yes, he did," said Evelina, dropping her lids with a smile. "He seemed
+to be just crazy to talk to somebody--somebody agreeable, I mean. I
+think the man's unhappy, Ann Eliza."
+
+"So do I," broke from the elder sister.
+
+"He seems such an educated man, too. He was reading the paper when
+I went in. Ain't it sad to think of his being reduced to that little
+store, after being years at Tiff'ny's, and one of the head men in their
+clock-department?"
+
+"He told you all that?"
+
+"Why, yes. I think he'd a' told me everything ever happened to him if
+I'd had the time to stay and listen. I tell you he's dead lonely, Ann
+Eliza."
+
+"Yes," said Ann Eliza.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Two days afterward, Ann Eliza noticed that Evelina, before they sat down
+to supper, pinned a crimson bow under her collar; and when the meal
+was finished the younger sister, who seldom concerned herself with the
+clearing of the table, set about with nervous haste to help Ann Eliza in
+the removal of the dishes.
+
+"I hate to see food mussing about," she grumbled. "Ain't it hateful
+having to do everything in one room?"
+
+"Oh, Evelina, I've always thought we was so comfortable," Ann Eliza
+protested.
+
+"Well, so we are, comfortable enough; but I don't suppose there's any
+harm in my saying I wisht we had a parlour, is there? Anyway, we might
+manage to buy a screen to hide the bed."
+
+Ann Eliza coloured. There was something vaguely embarrassing in
+Evelina's suggestion.
+
+"I always think if we ask for more what we have may be taken from us,"
+she ventured.
+
+"Well, whoever took it wouldn't get much," Evelina retorted with a laugh
+as she swept up the table-cloth.
+
+A few moments later the back room was in its usual flawless order and
+the two sisters had seated themselves near the lamp. Ann Eliza had taken
+up her sewing, and Evelina was preparing to make artificial flowers.
+The sisters usually relegated this more delicate business to the long
+leisure of the summer months; but to-night Evelina had brought out the
+box which lay all winter under the bed, and spread before her a bright
+array of muslin petals, yellow stamens and green corollas, and a tray of
+little implements curiously suggestive of the dental art. Ann Eliza made
+no remark on this unusual proceeding; perhaps she guessed why, for that
+evening her sister had chosen a graceful task.
+
+Presently a knock on the outer door made them look up; but Evelina, the
+first on her feet, said promptly: "Sit still. I'll see who it is."
+
+Ann Eliza was glad to sit still: the baby's petticoat that she was
+stitching shook in her fingers.
+
+"Sister, here's Mr. Ramy come to look at the clock," said Evelina, a
+moment later, in the high drawl she cultivated before strangers; and
+a shortish man with a pale bearded face and upturned coat-collar came
+stiffly into the room.
+
+Ann Eliza let her work fall as she stood up. "You're very welcome, I'm
+sure, Mr. Ramy. It's real kind of you to call."
+
+"Nod ad all, ma'am." A tendency to illustrate Grimm's law in the
+interchange of his consonants betrayed the clockmaker's nationality, but
+he was evidently used to speaking English, or at least the particular
+branch of the vernacular with which the Bunner sisters were familiar.
+"I don't like to led any clock go out of my store without being sure it
+gives satisfaction," he added.
+
+"Oh--but we were satisfied," Ann Eliza assured him.
+
+"But I wasn't, you see, ma'am," said Mr. Ramy looking slowly about the
+room, "nor I won't be, not till I see that clock's going all right."
+
+"May I assist you off with your coat, Mr. Ramy?" Evelina interposed. She
+could never trust Ann Eliza to remember these opening ceremonies.
+
+"Thank you, ma'am," he replied, and taking his thread-bare over-coat and
+shabby hat she laid them on a chair with the gesture she imagined the
+lady with the puffed sleeves might make use of on similar occasions.
+Ann Eliza's social sense was roused, and she felt that the next act
+of hospitality must be hers. "Won't you suit yourself to a seat?" she
+suggested. "My sister will reach down the clock; but I'm sure she's all
+right again. She's went beautiful ever since you fixed her."
+
+"Dat's good," said Mr. Ramy. His lips parted in a smile which showed a
+row of yellowish teeth with one or two gaps in it; but in spite of this
+disclosure Ann Eliza thought his smile extremely pleasant: there was
+something wistful and conciliating in it which agreed with the pathos
+of his sunken cheeks and prominent eyes. As he took the lamp, the light
+fell on his bulging forehead and wide skull thinly covered with grayish
+hair. His hands were pale and broad, with knotty joints and square
+finger-tips rimmed with grime; but his touch was as light as a woman's.
+
+"Well, ladies, dat clock's all right," he pronounced.
+
+"I'm sure we're very much obliged to you," said Evelina, throwing a
+glance at her sister.
+
+"Oh," Ann Eliza murmured, involuntarily answering the admonition.
+She selected a key from the bunch that hung at her waist with her
+cutting-out scissors, and fitting it into the lock of the cupboard,
+brought out the cherry brandy and three old-fashioned glasses engraved
+with vine-wreaths.
+
+"It's a very cold night," she said, "and maybe you'd like a sip of this
+cordial. It was made a great while ago by our grandmother."
+
+"It looks fine," said Mr. Ramy bowing, and Ann Eliza filled the glasses.
+In her own and Evelina's she poured only a few drops, but she filled
+their guest's to the brim. "My sister and I seldom take wine," she
+explained.
+
+With another bow, which included both his hostesses, Mr. Ramy drank off
+the cherry brandy and pronounced it excellent.
+
+Evelina meanwhile, with an assumption of industry intended to put
+their guest at ease, had taken up her instruments and was twisting a
+rose-petal into shape.
+
+"You make artificial flowers, I see, ma'am," said Mr. Ramy with
+interest. "It's very pretty work. I had a lady-vriend in Shermany dat
+used to make flowers." He put out a square finger-tip to touch the
+petal.
+
+Evelina blushed a little. "You left Germany long ago, I suppose?"
+
+"Dear me yes, a goot while ago. I was only ninedeen when I come to the
+States."
+
+After this the conversation dragged on intermittently till Mr. Ramy,
+peering about the room with the short-sighted glance of his race, said
+with an air of interest: "You're pleasantly fixed here; it looks real
+cosy." The note of wistfulness in his voice was obscurely moving to Ann
+Eliza.
+
+"Oh, we live very plainly," said Evelina, with an affectation of
+grandeur deeply impressive to her sister. "We have very simple tastes."
+
+"You look real comfortable, anyhow," said Mr. Ramy. His bulging eyes
+seemed to muster the details of the scene with a gentle envy. "I wisht
+I had as good a store; but I guess no blace seems home-like when you're
+always alone in it."
+
+For some minutes longer the conversation moved on at this desultory
+pace, and then Mr. Ramy, who had been obviously nerving himself for
+the difficult act of departure, took his leave with an abruptness
+which would have startled anyone used to the subtler gradations
+of intercourse. But to Ann Eliza and her sister there was nothing
+surprising in his abrupt retreat. The long-drawn agonies of preparing to
+leave, and the subsequent dumb plunge through the door, were so usual in
+their circle that they would have been as much embarrassed as Mr. Ramy
+if he had tried to put any fluency into his adieux.
+
+After he had left both sisters remained silent for a while; then
+Evelina, laying aside her unfinished flower, said: "I'll go and lock
+up."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Intolerably monotonous seemed now to the Bunner sisters the treadmill
+routine of the shop, colourless and long their evenings about the lamp,
+aimless their habitual interchange of words to the weary accompaniment
+of the sewing and pinking machines.
+
+It was perhaps with the idea of relieving the tension of their mood
+that Evelina, the following Sunday, suggested inviting Miss Mellins to
+supper. The Bunner sisters were not in a position to be lavish of the
+humblest hospitality, but two or three times in the year they shared
+their evening meal with a friend; and Miss Mellins, still flushed with
+the importance of her "turn," seemed the most interesting guest they
+could invite.
+
+As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table, embellished by
+the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet pickles, the dress-maker's
+sharp swarthy person stood out vividly between the neutral-tinted
+sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman with a glossy yellow face and
+a frizz of black hair bristling with imitation tortoise-shell pins. Her
+sleeves had a fashionable cut, and half a dozen metal bangles rattled
+on her wrists. Her voice rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a
+stream of anecdote and ejaculation; and her round black eyes jumped with
+acrobatic velocity from one face to another. Miss Mellins was always
+having or hearing of amazing adventures. She had surprised a burglar in
+her room at midnight (though how he got there, what he robbed her
+of, and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her
+auditors); she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer (a
+rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a customer who
+was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very wealthy lady) who
+had been arrested in a department store for kleptomania; she had been
+present at a spiritualist seance where an old gentleman had died in a
+fit on seeing a materialization of his mother-in-law; she had escaped
+from two fires in her night-gown, and at the funeral of her first cousin
+the horses attached to the hearse had run away and smashed the coffin,
+precipitating her relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his
+distracted family.
+
+A sceptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins's proneness to
+adventure by the fact that she derived her chief mental nourishment from
+the Police Gazette and the Fireside Weekly; but her lot was cast in a
+circle where such insinuations were not likely to be heard, and where
+the title-role in blood-curdling drama had long been her recognized
+right.
+
+"Yes," she was now saying, her emphatic eyes on Ann Eliza, "you may not
+believe it, Miss Bunner, and I don't know's I should myself if anybody
+else was to tell me, but over a year before ever I was born, my mother
+she went to see a gypsy fortune-teller that was exhibited in a tent on
+the Battery with the green-headed lady, though her father warned her
+not to--and what you s'pose she told her? Why, she told her these very
+words--says she: 'Your next child'll be a girl with jet-black curls, and
+she'll suffer from spasms.'"
+
+"Mercy!" murmured Ann Eliza, a ripple of sympathy running down her
+spine.
+
+"D'you ever have spasms before, Miss Mellins?" Evelina asked.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," the dress-maker declared. "And where'd you suppose I had
+'em? Why, at my cousin Emma McIntyre's wedding, her that married the
+apothecary over in Jersey City, though her mother appeared to her in a
+dream and told her she'd rue the day she done it, but as Emma said,
+she got more advice than she wanted from the living, and if she was to
+listen to spectres too she'd never be sure what she'd ought to do and
+what she'd oughtn't; but I will say her husband took to drink, and she
+never was the same woman after her fust baby--well, they had an elegant
+church wedding, and what you s'pose I saw as I was walkin' up the aisle
+with the wedding percession?"
+
+"Well?" Ann Eliza whispered, forgetting to thread her needle.
+
+"Why, a coffin, to be sure, right on the top step of the chancel--Emma's
+folks is 'piscopalians and she would have a church wedding, though HIS
+mother raised a terrible rumpus over it--well, there it set, right in
+front of where the minister stood that was going to marry 'em, a coffin
+covered with a black velvet pall with a gold fringe, and a 'Gates Ajar'
+in white camellias atop of it."
+
+"Goodness," said Evelina, starting, "there's a knock!"
+
+"Who can it be?" shuddered Ann Eliza, still under the spell of Miss
+Mellins's hallucination.
+
+Evelina rose and lit a candle to guide her through the shop. They heard
+her turn the key of the outer door, and a gust of night air stirred the
+close atmosphere of the back room; then there was a sound of vivacious
+exclamations, and Evelina returned with Mr. Ramy.
+
+Ann Eliza's heart rocked like a boat in a heavy sea, and the
+dress-maker's eyes, distended with curiosity, sprang eagerly from face
+to face.
+
+"I just thought I'd call in again," said Mr. Ramy, evidently somewhat
+disconcerted by the presence of Miss Mellins. "Just to see how the
+clock's behaving," he added with his hollow-cheeked smile.
+
+"Oh, she's behaving beautiful," said Ann Eliza; "but we're real glad to
+see you all the same. Miss Mellins, let me make you acquainted with Mr.
+Ramy."
+
+The dress-maker tossed back her head and dropped her lids in
+condescending recognition of the stranger's presence; and Mr. Ramy
+responded by an awkward bow. After the first moment of constraint a
+renewed sense of satisfaction filled the consciousness of the three
+women. The Bunner sisters were not sorry to let Miss Mellins see that
+they received an occasional evening visit, and Miss Mellins was clearly
+enchanted at the opportunity of pouring her latest tale into a new ear.
+As for Mr. Ramy, he adjusted himself to the situation with greater ease
+than might have been expected, and Evelina, who had been sorry that he
+should enter the room while the remains of supper still lingered on
+the table, blushed with pleasure at his good-humored offer to help her
+"glear away."
+
+The table cleared, Ann Eliza suggested a game of cards; and it was after
+eleven o'clock when Mr. Ramy rose to take leave. His adieux were so much
+less abrupt than on the occasion of his first visit that Evelina was
+able to satisfy her sense of etiquette by escorting him, candle in hand,
+to the outer door; and as the two disappeared into the shop Miss Mellins
+playfully turned to Ann Eliza.
+
+"Well, well, Miss Bunner," she murmured, jerking her chin in the
+direction of the retreating figures, "I'd no idea your sister was
+keeping company. On'y to think!"
+
+Ann Eliza, roused from a state of dreamy beatitude, turned her timid
+eyes on the dress-maker.
+
+"Oh, you're mistaken, Miss Mellins. We don't har'ly know Mr. Ramy."
+
+Miss Mellins smiled incredulously. "You go 'long, Miss Bunner. I guess
+there'll be a wedding somewheres round here before spring, and I'll be
+real offended if I ain't asked to make the dress. I've always seen her
+in a gored satin with rooshings."
+
+Ann Eliza made no answer. She had grown very pale, and her eyes lingered
+searchingly on Evelina as the younger sister re-entered the room.
+Evelina's cheeks were pink, and her blue eyes glittered; but it seemed
+to Ann Eliza that the coquettish tilt of her head regrettably emphasized
+the weakness of her receding chin. It was the first time that Ann
+Eliza had ever seen a flaw in her sister's beauty, and her involuntary
+criticism startled her like a secret disloyalty.
+
+That night, after the light had been put out, the elder sister knelt
+longer than usual at her prayers. In the silence of the darkened
+room she was offering up certain dreams and aspirations whose brief
+blossoming had lent a transient freshness to her days. She wondered
+now how she could ever have supposed that Mr. Ramy's visits had another
+cause than the one Miss Mellins suggested. Had not the sight of Evelina
+first inspired him with a sudden solicitude for the welfare of the
+clock? And what charms but Evelina's could have induced him to repeat
+his visit? Grief held up its torch to the frail fabric of Ann Eliza's
+illusions, and with a firm heart she watched them shrivel into ashes;
+then, rising from her knees full of the chill joy of renunciation, she
+laid a kiss on the crimping pins of the sleeping Evelina and crept under
+the bedspread at her side.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+During the months that followed, Mr. Ramy visited the sisters with
+increasing frequency. It became his habit to call on them every Sunday
+evening, and occasionally during the week he would find an excuse for
+dropping in unannounced as they were settling down to their work beside
+the lamp. Ann Eliza noticed that Evelina now took the precaution of
+putting on her crimson bow every evening before supper, and that she
+had refurbished with a bit of carefully washed lace the black silk
+which they still called new because it had been bought a year after Ann
+Eliza's.
+
+Mr. Ramy, as he grew more intimate, became less conversational, and
+after the sisters had blushingly accorded him the privilege of a pipe he
+began to permit himself long stretches of meditative silence that
+were not without charm to his hostesses. There was something at once
+fortifying and pacific in the sense of that tranquil male presence in
+an atmosphere which had so long quivered with little feminine doubts and
+distresses; and the sisters fell into the habit of saying to each other,
+in moments of uncertainty: "We'll ask Mr. Ramy when he comes," and of
+accepting his verdict, whatever it might be, with a fatalistic readiness
+that relieved them of all responsibility.
+
+When Mr. Ramy drew the pipe from his mouth and became, in his turn,
+confidential, the acuteness of their sympathy grew almost painful to the
+sisters. With passionate participation they listened to the story of his
+early struggles in Germany, and of the long illness which had been the
+cause of his recent misfortunes. The name of the Mrs. Hochmuller (an old
+comrade's widow) who had nursed him through his fever was greeted with
+reverential sighs and an inward pang of envy whenever it recurred in his
+biographical monologues, and once when the sisters were alone Evelina
+called a responsive flush to Ann Eliza's brow by saying suddenly,
+without the mention of any name: "I wonder what she's like?"
+
+One day toward spring Mr. Ramy, who had by this time become as much a
+part of their lives as the letter-carrier or the milkman, ventured the
+suggestion that the ladies should accompany him to an exhibition of
+stereopticon views which was to take place at Chickering Hall on the
+following evening.
+
+After their first breathless "Oh!" of pleasure there was a silence
+of mutual consultation, which Ann Eliza at last broke by saying: "You
+better go with Mr. Ramy, Evelina. I guess we don't both want to leave
+the store at night."
+
+Evelina, with such protests as politeness demanded, acquiesced in this
+opinion, and spent the next day in trimming a white chip bonnet with
+forget-me-nots of her own making. Ann Eliza brought out her mosaic
+brooch, a cashmere scarf of their mother's was taken from its linen
+cerements, and thus adorned Evelina blushingly departed with Mr. Ramy,
+while the elder sister sat down in her place at the pinking-machine.
+
+It seemed to Ann Eliza that she was alone for hours, and she was
+surprised, when she heard Evelina tap on the door, to find that the
+clock marked only half-past ten.
+
+"It must have gone wrong again," she reflected as she rose to let her
+sister in.
+
+The evening had been brilliantly interesting, and several striking
+stereopticon views of Berlin had afforded Mr. Ramy the opportunity of
+enlarging on the marvels of his native city.
+
+"He said he'd love to show it all to me!" Evelina declared as Ann Eliza
+conned her glowing face. "Did you ever hear anything so silly? I didn't
+know which way to look."
+
+Ann Eliza received this confidence with a sympathetic murmur.
+
+"My bonnet IS becoming, isn't it?" Evelina went on irrelevantly, smiling
+at her reflection in the cracked glass above the chest of drawers.
+
+"You're jest lovely," said Ann Eliza.
+
+
+Spring was making itself unmistakably known to the distrustful New
+Yorker by an increased harshness of wind and prevalence of dust, when
+one day Evelina entered the back room at supper-time with a cluster of
+jonquils in her hand.
+
+"I was just that foolish," she answered Ann Eliza's wondering glance, "I
+couldn't help buyin' 'em. I felt as if I must have something pretty to
+look at right away."
+
+"Oh, sister," said Ann Eliza, in trembling sympathy. She felt that
+special indulgence must be conceded to those in Evelina's state since
+she had had her own fleeting vision of such mysterious longings as the
+words betrayed.
+
+Evelina, meanwhile, had taken the bundle of dried grasses out of the
+broken china vase, and was putting the jonquils in their place with
+touches that lingered down their smooth stems and blade-like leaves.
+
+"Ain't they pretty?" she kept repeating as she gathered the flowers into
+a starry circle. "Seems as if spring was really here, don't it?"
+
+Ann Eliza remembered that it was Mr. Ramy's evening.
+
+When he came, the Teutonic eye for anything that blooms made him turn at
+once to the jonquils.
+
+"Ain't dey pretty?" he said. "Seems like as if de spring was really
+here."
+
+"Don't it?" Evelina exclaimed, thrilled by the coincidence of their
+thought. "It's just what I was saying to my sister."
+
+Ann Eliza got up suddenly and moved away; she remembered that she had
+not wound the clock the day before. Evelina was sitting at the table;
+the jonquils rose slenderly between herself and Mr. Ramy.
+
+"Oh," she murmured with vague eyes, "how I'd love to get away somewheres
+into the country this very minute--somewheres where it was green and
+quiet. Seems as if I couldn't stand the city another day." But Ann Eliza
+noticed that she was looking at Mr. Ramy, and not at the flowers.
+
+"I guess we might go to Cendral Park some Sunday," their visitor
+suggested. "Do you ever go there, Miss Evelina?"
+
+"No, we don't very often; leastways we ain't been for a good while." She
+sparkled at the prospect. "It would be lovely, wouldn't it, Ann Eliza?"
+
+"Why, yes," said the elder sister, coming back to her seat.
+
+"Well, why don't we go next Sunday?" Mr. Ramy continued. "And we'll
+invite Miss Mellins too--that'll make a gosy little party."
+
+That night when Evelina undressed she took a jonquil from the vase
+and pressed it with a certain ostentation between the leaves of her
+prayer-book. Ann Eliza, covertly observing her, felt that Evelina was
+not sorry to be observed, and that her own acute consciousness of the
+act was somehow regarded as magnifying its significance.
+
+The following Sunday broke blue and warm. The Bunner sisters were
+habitual church-goers, but for once they left their prayer-books on the
+what-not, and ten o'clock found them, gloved and bonneted, awaiting Miss
+Mellins's knock. Miss Mellins presently appeared in a glitter of jet
+sequins and spangles, with a tale of having seen a strange man prowling
+under her windows till he was called off at dawn by a confederate's
+whistle; and shortly afterward came Mr. Ramy, his hair brushed with more
+than usual care, his broad hands encased in gloves of olive-green kid.
+
+The little party set out for the nearest street-car, and a flutter of
+mingled gratification and embarrassment stirred Ann Eliza's bosom when
+it was found that Mr. Ramy intended to pay their fares. Nor did he fail
+to live up to this opening liberality; for after guiding them through
+the Mall and the Ramble he led the way to a rustic restaurant where,
+also at his expense, they fared idyllically on milk and lemon-pie.
+
+After this they resumed their walk, strolling on with the slowness of
+unaccustomed holiday-makers from one path to another--through budding
+shrubberies, past grass-banks sprinkled with lilac crocuses, and under
+rocks on which the forsythia lay like sudden sunshine. Everything about
+her seemed new and miraculously lovely to Ann Eliza; but she kept her
+feelings to herself, leaving it to Evelina to exclaim at the hepaticas
+under the shady ledges, and to Miss Mellins, less interested in the
+vegetable than in the human world, to remark significantly on the
+probable history of the persons they met. All the alleys were thronged
+with promenaders and obstructed by perambulators; and Miss Mellins's
+running commentary threw a glare of lurid possibilities over the placid
+family groups and their romping progeny.
+
+Ann Eliza was in no mood for such interpretations of life; but, knowing
+that Miss Mellins had been invited for the sole purpose of keeping her
+company she continued to cling to the dress-maker's side, letting
+Mr. Ramy lead the way with Evelina. Miss Mellins, stimulated by the
+excitement of the occasion, grew more and more discursive, and
+her ceaseless talk, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of the crowd, were
+unspeakably bewildering to Ann Eliza. Her feet, accustomed to the
+slippered ease of the shop, ached with the unfamiliar effort of walking,
+and her ears with the din of the dress-maker's anecdotes; but every
+nerve in her was aware of Evelina's enjoyment, and she was determined
+that no weariness of hers should curtail it. Yet even her heroism shrank
+from the significant glances which Miss Mellins presently began to
+cast at the couple in front of them: Ann Eliza could bear to connive at
+Evelina's bliss, but not to acknowledge it to others.
+
+At length Evelina's feet also failed her, and she turned to suggest
+that they ought to be going home. Her flushed face had grown pale with
+fatigue, but her eyes were radiant.
+
+The return lived in Ann Eliza's memory with the persistence of an evil
+dream. The horse-cars were packed with the returning throng, and they
+had to let a dozen go by before they could push their way into one that
+was already crowded. Ann Eliza had never before felt so tired. Even Miss
+Mellins's flow of narrative ran dry, and they sat silent, wedged between
+a negro woman and a pock-marked man with a bandaged head, while the car
+rumbled slowly down a squalid avenue to their corner. Evelina and Mr.
+Ramy sat together in the forward part of the car, and Ann Eliza could
+catch only an occasional glimpse of the forget-me-not bonnet and the
+clock-maker's shiny coat-collar; but when the little party got out at
+their corner the crowd swept them together again, and they walked back
+in the effortless silence of tired children to the Bunner sisters'
+basement. As Miss Mellins and Mr. Ramy turned to go their various ways
+Evelina mustered a last display of smiles; but Ann Eliza crossed the
+threshold in silence, feeling the stillness of the little shop reach out
+to her like consoling arms.
+
+That night she could not sleep; but as she lay cold and rigid at her
+sister's side, she suddenly felt the pressure of Evelina's arms, and
+heard her whisper: "Oh, Ann Eliza, warn't it heavenly?"
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+For four days after their Sunday in the Park the Bunner sisters had no
+news of Mr. Ramy. At first neither one betrayed her disappointment and
+anxiety to the other; but on the fifth morning Evelina, always the first
+to yield to her feelings, said, as she turned from her untasted tea: "I
+thought you'd oughter take that money out by now, Ann Eliza."
+
+Ann Eliza understood and reddened. The winter had been a fairly
+prosperous one for the sisters, and their slowly accumulated savings
+had now reached the handsome sum of two hundred dollars; but the
+satisfaction they might have felt in this unwonted opulence had been
+clouded by a suggestion of Miss Mellins's that there were dark rumours
+concerning the savings bank in which their funds were deposited. They
+knew Miss Mellins was given to vain alarms; but her words, by the sheer
+force of repetition, had so shaken Ann Eliza's peace that after long
+hours of midnight counsel the sisters had decided to advise with
+Mr. Ramy; and on Ann Eliza, as the head of the house, this duty
+had devolved. Mr. Ramy, when consulted, had not only confirmed the
+dress-maker's report, but had offered to find some safe investment which
+should give the sisters a higher rate of interest than the suspected
+savings bank; and Ann Eliza knew that Evelina alluded to the suggested
+transfer.
+
+"Why, yes, to be sure," she agreed. "Mr. Ramy said if he was us he
+wouldn't want to leave his money there any longer'n he could help."
+
+"It was over a week ago he said it," Evelina reminded her.
+
+"I know; but he told me to wait till he'd found out for sure about that
+other investment; and we ain't seen him since then."
+
+Ann Eliza's words released their secret fear. "I wonder what's happened
+to him," Evelina said. "You don't suppose he could be sick?"
+
+"I was wondering too," Ann Eliza rejoined; and the sisters looked down
+at their plates.
+
+"I should think you'd oughter do something about that money pretty
+soon," Evelina began again.
+
+"Well, I know I'd oughter. What would you do if you was me?"
+
+"If I was YOU," said her sister, with perceptible emphasis and a rising
+blush, "I'd go right round and see if Mr. Ramy was sick. YOU could."
+
+The words pierced Ann Eliza like a blade. "Yes, that's so," she said.
+
+"It would only seem friendly, if he really IS sick. If I was you I'd go
+to-day," Evelina continued; and after dinner Ann Eliza went.
+
+On the way she had to leave a parcel at the dyer's, and having performed
+that errand she turned toward Mr. Ramy's shop. Never before had she felt
+so old, so hopeless and humble. She knew she was bound on a love-errand
+of Evelina's, and the knowledge seemed to dry the last drop of young
+blood in her veins. It took from her, too, all her faded virginal
+shyness; and with a brisk composure she turned the handle of the
+clock-maker's door.
+
+But as she entered her heart began to tremble, for she saw Mr. Ramy, his
+face hidden in his hands, sitting behind the counter in an attitude of
+strange dejection. At the click of the latch he looked up slowly, fixing
+a lustreless stare on Ann Eliza. For a moment she thought he did not
+know her.
+
+"Oh, you're sick!" she exclaimed; and the sound of her voice seemed to
+recall his wandering senses.
+
+"Why, if it ain't Miss Bunner!" he said, in a low thick tone; but he
+made no attempt to move, and she noticed that his face was the colour of
+yellow ashes.
+
+"You ARE sick," she persisted, emboldened by his evident need of help.
+"Mr. Ramy, it was real unfriendly of you not to let us know."
+
+He continued to look at her with dull eyes. "I ain't been sick," he
+said. "Leastways not very: only one of my old turns." He spoke in a slow
+laboured way, as if he had difficulty in getting his words together.
+
+"Rheumatism?" she ventured, seeing how unwillingly he seemed to move.
+
+"Well--somethin' like, maybe. I couldn't hardly put a name to it."
+
+"If it WAS anything like rheumatism, my grandmother used to make a
+tea--" Ann Eliza began: she had forgotten, in the warmth of the moment,
+that she had only come as Evelina's messenger.
+
+At the mention of tea an expression of uncontrollable repugnance passed
+over Mr. Ramy's face. "Oh, I guess I'm getting on all right. I've just
+got a headache to-day."
+
+Ann Eliza's courage dropped at the note of refusal in his voice.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said gently. "My sister and me'd have been glad to do
+anything we could for you."
+
+"Thank you kindly," said Mr. Ramy wearily; then, as she turned to the
+door, he added with an effort: "Maybe I'll step round to-morrow."
+
+"We'll be real glad," Ann Eliza repeated. Her eyes were fixed on a dusty
+bronze clock in the window. She was unaware of looking at it at
+the time, but long afterward she remembered that it represented a
+Newfoundland dog with his paw on an open book.
+
+When she reached home there was a purchaser in the shop, turning over
+hooks and eyes under Evelina's absent-minded supervision. Ann Eliza
+passed hastily into the back room, but in an instant she heard her
+sister at her side.
+
+"Quick! I told her I was goin' to look for some smaller hooks--how is
+he?" Evelina gasped.
+
+"He ain't been very well," said Ann Eliza slowly, her eyes on Evelina's
+eager face; "but he says he'll be sure to be round to-morrow night."
+
+"He will? Are you telling me the truth?"
+
+"Why, Evelina Bunner!"
+
+"Oh, I don't care!" cried the younger recklessly, rushing back into the
+shop.
+
+Ann Eliza stood burning with the shame of Evelina's self-exposure. She
+was shocked that, even to her, Evelina should lay bare the nakedness of
+her emotion; and she tried to turn her thoughts from it as though its
+recollection made her a sharer in her sister's debasement.
+
+The next evening, Mr. Ramy reappeared, still somewhat sallow and
+red-lidded, but otherwise his usual self. Ann Eliza consulted him about
+the investment he had recommended, and after it had been settled that he
+should attend to the matter for her he took up the illustrated volume of
+Longfellow--for, as the sisters had learned, his culture soared beyond
+the newspapers--and read aloud, with a fine confusion of consonants, the
+poem on "Maidenhood." Evelina lowered her lids while he read. It was a
+very beautiful evening, and Ann Eliza thought afterward how different
+life might have been with a companion who read poetry like Mr. Ramy.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+During the ensuing weeks Mr. Ramy, though his visits were as frequent as
+ever, did not seem to regain his usual spirits. He complained frequently
+of headache, but rejected Ann Eliza's tentatively proffered remedies,
+and seemed to shrink from any prolonged investigation of his symptoms.
+July had come, with a sudden ardour of heat, and one evening, as the
+three sat together by the open window in the back room, Evelina said:
+"I dunno what I wouldn't give, a night like this, for a breath of real
+country air."
+
+"So would I," said Mr. Ramy, knocking the ashes from his pipe. "I'd like
+to be setting in an arbour dis very minute."
+
+"Oh, wouldn't it be lovely?"
+
+"I always think it's real cool here--we'd be heaps hotter up where Miss
+Mellins is," said Ann Eliza.
+
+"Oh, I daresay--but we'd be heaps cooler somewhere else," her sister
+snapped: she was not infrequently exasperated by Ann Eliza's furtive
+attempts to mollify Providence.
+
+A few days later Mr. Ramy appeared with a suggestion which enchanted
+Evelina. He had gone the day before to see his friend, Mrs. Hochmuller,
+who lived in the outskirts of Hoboken, and Mrs. Hochmuller had proposed
+that on the following Sunday he should bring the Bunner sisters to spend
+the day with her.
+
+"She's got a real garden, you know," Mr. Ramy explained, "wid trees and
+a real summer-house to set in; and hens and chickens too. And it's an
+elegant sail over on de ferry-boat."
+
+The proposal drew no response from Ann Eliza. She was still oppressed by
+the recollection of her interminable Sunday in the Park; but, obedient
+to Evelina's imperious glance, she finally faltered out an acceptance.
+
+The Sunday was a very hot one, and once on the ferry-boat Ann Eliza
+revived at the touch of the salt breeze, and the spectacle of the
+crowded waters; but when they reached the other shore, and stepped out
+on the dirty wharf, she began to ache with anticipated weariness. They
+got into a street-car, and were jolted from one mean street to another,
+till at length Mr. Ramy pulled the conductor's sleeve and they got out
+again; then they stood in the blazing sun, near the door of a crowded
+beer-saloon, waiting for another car to come; and that carried them out
+to a thinly settled district, past vacant lots and narrow brick houses
+standing in unsupported solitude, till they finally reached an almost
+rural region of scattered cottages and low wooden buildings that looked
+like village "stores." Here the car finally stopped of its own accord,
+and they walked along a rutty road, past a stone-cutter's yard with a
+high fence tapestried with theatrical advertisements, to a little red
+house with green blinds and a garden paling. Really, Mr. Ramy had not
+deceived them. Clumps of dielytra and day-lilies bloomed behind the
+paling, and a crooked elm hung romantically over the gable of the house.
+
+At the gate Mrs. Hochmuller, a broad woman in brick-brown merino, met
+them with nods and smiles, while her daughter Linda, a flaxen-haired
+girl with mottled red cheeks and a sidelong stare, hovered inquisitively
+behind her. Mrs. Hochmuller, leading the way into the house, conducted
+the Bunner sisters the way to her bedroom. Here they were invited to
+spread out on a mountainous white featherbed the cashmere mantles under
+which the solemnity of the occasion had compelled them to swelter,
+and when they had given their black silks the necessary twitch
+of readjustment, and Evelina had fluffed out her hair before a
+looking-glass framed in pink-shell work, their hostess led them to a
+stuffy parlour smelling of gingerbread. After another ceremonial pause,
+broken by polite enquiries and shy ejaculations, they were shown into
+the kitchen, where the table was already spread with strange-looking
+spice-cakes and stewed fruits, and where they presently found themselves
+seated between Mrs. Hochmuller and Mr. Ramy, while the staring Linda
+bumped back and forth from the stove with steaming dishes.
+
+To Ann Eliza the dinner seemed endless, and the rich fare strangely
+unappetizing. She was abashed by the easy intimacy of her hostess's
+voice and eye. With Mr. Ramy Mrs. Hochmuller was almost flippantly
+familiar, and it was only when Ann Eliza pictured her generous form bent
+above his sick-bed that she could forgive her for tersely addressing him
+as "Ramy." During one of the pauses of the meal Mrs. Hochmuller laid her
+knife and fork against the edges of her plate, and, fixing her eyes
+on the clock-maker's face, said accusingly: "You hat one of dem turns
+again, Ramy."
+
+"I dunno as I had," he returned evasively.
+
+Evelina glanced from one to the other. "Mr. Ramy HAS been sick," she
+said at length, as though to show that she also was in a position to
+speak with authority. "He's complained very frequently of headaches."
+
+"Ho!--I know him," said Mrs. Hochmuller with a laugh, her eyes still on
+the clock-maker. "Ain't you ashamed of yourself, Ramy?"
+
+Mr. Ramy, who was looking at his plate, said suddenly one word which the
+sisters could not understand; it sounded to Ann Eliza like "Shwike."
+
+Mrs. Hochmuller laughed again. "My, my," she said, "wouldn't you think
+he'd be ashamed to go and be sick and never dell me, me that nursed him
+troo dat awful fever?"
+
+"Yes, I SHOULD," said Evelina, with a spirited glance at Ramy; but he
+was looking at the sausages that Linda had just put on the table.
+
+When dinner was over Mrs. Hochmuller invited her guests to step out of
+the kitchen-door, and they found themselves in a green enclosure, half
+garden, half orchard. Grey hens followed by golden broods clucked under
+the twisted apple-boughs, a cat dozed on the edge of an old well, and
+from tree to tree ran the network of clothes-line that denoted Mrs.
+Hochmuller's calling. Beyond the apple trees stood a yellow summer-house
+festooned with scarlet runners; and below it, on the farther side of
+a rough fence, the land dipped down, holding a bit of woodland in
+its hollow. It was all strangely sweet and still on that hot Sunday
+afternoon, and as she moved across the grass under the apple-boughs Ann
+Eliza thought of quiet afternoons in church, and of the hymns her mother
+had sung to her when she was a baby.
+
+Evelina was more restless. She wandered from the well to the
+summer-house and back, she tossed crumbs to the chickens and disturbed
+the cat with arch caresses; and at last she expressed a desire to go
+down into the wood.
+
+"I guess you got to go round by the road, then," said Mrs. Hochmuller.
+"My Linda she goes troo a hole in de fence, but I guess you'd tear your
+dress if you was to dry."
+
+"I'll help you," said Mr. Ramy; and guided by Linda the pair walked
+along the fence till they reached a narrow gap in its boards. Through
+this they disappeared, watched curiously in their descent by the
+grinning Linda, while Mrs. Hochmuller and Ann Eliza were left alone in
+the summer-house.
+
+Mrs. Hochmuller looked at her guest with a confidential smile. "I guess
+dey'll be gone quite a while," she remarked, jerking her double chin
+toward the gap in the fence. "Folks like dat don't never remember about
+de dime." And she drew out her knitting.
+
+Ann Eliza could think of nothing to say.
+
+"Your sister she thinks a great lot of him, don't she?" her hostess
+continued.
+
+Ann Eliza's cheeks grew hot. "Ain't you a teeny bit lonesome away out
+here sometimes?" she asked. "I should think you'd be scared nights, all
+alone with your daughter."
+
+"Oh, no, I ain't," said Mrs. Hochmuller. "You see I take in
+washing--dat's my business--and it's a lot cheaper doing it out here dan
+in de city: where'd I get a drying-ground like dis in Hobucken? And den
+it's safer for Linda too; it geeps her outer de streets."
+
+"Oh," said Ann Eliza, shrinking. She began to feel a distinct aversion
+for her hostess, and her eyes turned with involuntary annoyance to the
+square-backed form of Linda, still inquisitively suspended on the fence.
+It seemed to Ann Eliza that Evelina and her companion would never return
+from the wood; but they came at length, Mr. Ramy's brow pearled with
+perspiration, Evelina pink and conscious, a drooping bunch of ferns in
+her hand; and it was clear that, to her at least, the moments had been
+winged.
+
+"D'you suppose they'll revive?" she asked, holding up the ferns; but
+Ann Eliza, rising at her approach, said stiffly: "We'd better be getting
+home, Evelina."
+
+"Mercy me! Ain't you going to take your coffee first?" Mrs. Hochmuller
+protested; and Ann Eliza found to her dismay that another long
+gastronomic ceremony must intervene before politeness permitted them
+to leave. At length, however, they found themselves again on the
+ferry-boat. Water and sky were grey, with a dividing gleam of sunset
+that sent sleek opal waves in the boat's wake. The wind had a cool tarry
+breath, as though it had travelled over miles of shipping, and the hiss
+of the water about the paddles was as delicious as though it had been
+splashed into their tired faces.
+
+Ann Eliza sat apart, looking away from the others. She had made up her
+mind that Mr. Ramy had proposed to Evelina in the wood, and she was
+silently preparing herself to receive her sister's confidence that
+evening.
+
+But Evelina was apparently in no mood for confidences. When they reached
+home she put her faded ferns in water, and after supper, when she had
+laid aside her silk dress and the forget-me-not bonnet, she remained
+silently seated in her rocking-chair near the open window. It was long
+since Ann Eliza had seen her in so uncommunicative a mood.
+
+
+The following Saturday Ann Eliza was sitting alone in the shop when the
+door opened and Mr. Ramy entered. He had never before called at that
+hour, and she wondered a little anxiously what had brought him.
+
+"Has anything happened?" she asked, pushing aside the basketful of
+buttons she had been sorting.
+
+"Not's I know of," said Mr. Ramy tranquilly. "But I always close up the
+store at two o'clock Saturdays at this season, so I thought I might as
+well call round and see you."
+
+"I'm real glad, I'm sure," said Ann Eliza; "but Evelina's out."
+
+"I know dat," Mr. Ramy answered. "I met her round de corner. She told me
+she got to go to dat new dyer's up in Forty-eighth Street. She won't be
+back for a couple of hours, har'ly, will she?"
+
+Ann Eliza looked at him with rising bewilderment. "No, I guess not," she
+answered; her instinctive hospitality prompting her to add: "Won't you
+set down jest the same?"
+
+Mr. Ramy sat down on the stool beside the counter, and Ann Eliza
+returned to her place behind it.
+
+"I can't leave the store," she explained.
+
+"Well, I guess we're very well here." Ann Eliza had become suddenly
+aware that Mr. Ramy was looking at her with unusual intentness.
+Involuntarily her hand strayed to the thin streaks of hair on her
+temples, and thence descended to straighten the brooch beneath her
+collar.
+
+"You're looking very well to-day, Miss Bunner," said Mr. Ramy, following
+her gesture with a smile.
+
+"Oh," said Ann Eliza nervously. "I'm always well in health," she added.
+
+"I guess you're healthier than your sister, even if you are less
+sizeable."
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Evelina's a mite nervous sometimes, but she ain't a
+bit sickly."
+
+"She eats heartier than you do; but that don't mean nothing," said Mr.
+Ramy.
+
+Ann Eliza was silent. She could not follow the trend of his thought, and
+she did not care to commit herself farther about Evelina before she
+had ascertained if Mr. Ramy considered nervousness interesting or the
+reverse.
+
+But Mr. Ramy spared her all farther indecision.
+
+"Well, Miss Bunner," he said, drawing his stool closer to the counter,
+"I guess I might as well tell you fust as last what I come here for
+to-day. I want to get married."
+
+Ann Eliza, in many a prayerful midnight hour, had sought to strengthen
+herself for the hearing of this avowal, but now that it had come she
+felt pitifully frightened and unprepared. Mr. Ramy was leaning with both
+elbows on the counter, and she noticed that his nails were clean and
+that he had brushed his hat; yet even these signs had not prepared her!
+
+At last she heard herself say, with a dry throat in which her heart was
+hammering: "Mercy me, Mr. Ramy!"
+
+"I want to get married," he repeated. "I'm too lonesome. It ain't good
+for a man to live all alone, and eat noding but cold meat every day."
+
+"No," said Ann Eliza softly.
+
+"And the dust fairly beats me."
+
+"Oh, the dust--I know!"
+
+Mr. Ramy stretched one of his blunt-fingered hands toward her. "I wisht
+you'd take me."
+
+Still Ann Eliza did not understand. She rose hesitatingly from her seat,
+pushing aside the basket of buttons which lay between them; then she
+perceived that Mr. Ramy was trying to take her hand, and as their
+fingers met a flood of joy swept over her. Never afterward, though
+every other word of their interview was stamped on her memory beyond
+all possible forgetting, could she recall what he said while their hands
+touched; she only knew that she seemed to be floating on a summer sea,
+and that all its waves were in her ears.
+
+"Me--me?" she gasped.
+
+"I guess so," said her suitor placidly. "You suit me right down to the
+ground, Miss Bunner. Dat's the truth."
+
+A woman passing along the street paused to look at the shop-window, and
+Ann Eliza half hoped she would come in; but after a desultory inspection
+she went on.
+
+"Maybe you don't fancy me?" Mr. Ramy suggested, discountenanced by Ann
+Eliza's silence.
+
+A word of assent was on her tongue, but her lips refused it. She must
+find some other way of telling him.
+
+"I don't say that."
+
+"Well, I always kinder thought we was suited to one another," Mr.
+Ramy continued, eased of his momentary doubt. "I always liked de quiet
+style--no fuss and airs, and not afraid of work." He spoke as though
+dispassionately cataloguing her charms.
+
+Ann Eliza felt that she must make an end. "But, Mr. Ramy, you don't
+understand. I've never thought of marrying."
+
+Mr. Ramy looked at her in surprise. "Why not?"
+
+"Well, I don't know, har'ly." She moistened her twitching lips. "The
+fact is, I ain't as active as I look. Maybe I couldn't stand the care.
+I ain't as spry as Evelina--nor as young," she added, with a last great
+effort.
+
+"But you do most of de work here, anyways," said her suitor doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, well, that's because Evelina's busy outside; and where there's only
+two women the work don't amount to much. Besides, I'm the oldest; I have
+to look after things," she hastened on, half pained that her simple ruse
+should so readily deceive him.
+
+"Well, I guess you're active enough for me," he persisted. His calm
+determination began to frighten her; she trembled lest her own should be
+less staunch.
+
+"No, no," she repeated, feeling the tears on her lashes. "I couldn't,
+Mr. Ramy, I couldn't marry. I'm so surprised. I always thought it
+was Evelina--always. And so did everybody else. She's so bright and
+pretty--it seemed so natural."
+
+"Well, you was all mistaken," said Mr. Ramy obstinately.
+
+"I'm so sorry."
+
+He rose, pushing back his chair.
+
+"You'd better think it over," he said, in the large tone of a man who
+feels he may safely wait.
+
+"Oh, no, no. It ain't any sorter use, Mr. Ramy. I don't never mean to
+marry. I get tired so easily--I'd be afraid of the work. And I have
+such awful headaches." She paused, racking her brain for more convincing
+infirmities.
+
+"Headaches, do you?" said Mr. Ramy, turning back.
+
+"My, yes, awful ones, that I have to give right up to. Evelina has to do
+everything when I have one of them headaches. She has to bring me my tea
+in the mornings."
+
+"Well, I'm sorry to hear it," said Mr. Ramy.
+
+"Thank you kindly all the same," Ann Eliza murmured. "And please
+don't--don't--" She stopped suddenly, looking at him through her tears.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," he answered. "Don't you fret, Miss Gunner.
+Folks have got to suit themselves." She thought his tone had grown more
+resigned since she had spoken of her headaches.
+
+For some moments he stood looking at her with a hesitating eye, as
+though uncertain how to end their conversation; and at length she found
+courage to say (in the words of a novel she had once read): "I don't
+want this should make any difference between us."
+
+"Oh, my, no," said Mr. Ramy, absently picking up his hat.
+
+"You'll come in just the same?" she continued, nerving herself to
+the effort. "We'd miss you awfully if you didn't. Evelina, she--" She
+paused, torn between her desire to turn his thoughts to Evelina, and the
+dread of prematurely disclosing her sister's secret.
+
+"Don't Miss Evelina have no headaches?" Mr. Ramy suddenly asked.
+
+"My, no, never--well, not to speak of, anyway. She ain't had one for
+ages, and when Evelina IS sick she won't never give in to it," Ann Eliza
+declared, making some hurried adjustments with her conscience.
+
+"I wouldn't have thought that," said Mr. Ramy.
+
+"I guess you don't know us as well as you thought you did."
+
+"Well, no, that's so; maybe I don't. I'll wish you good day, Miss
+Bunner"; and Mr. Ramy moved toward the door.
+
+"Good day, Mr. Ramy," Ann Eliza answered.
+
+She felt unutterably thankful to be alone. She knew the crucial moment
+of her life had passed, and she was glad that she had not fallen below
+her own ideals. It had been a wonderful experience; and in spite of
+the tears on her cheeks she was not sorry to have known it. Two facts,
+however, took the edge from its perfection: that it had happened in the
+shop, and that she had not had on her black silk.
+
+She passed the next hour in a state of dreamy ecstasy. Something had
+entered into her life of which no subsequent empoverishment could rob
+it: she glowed with the same rich sense of possessorship that once, as
+a little girl, she had felt when her mother had given her a gold locket
+and she had sat up in bed in the dark to draw it from its hiding-place
+beneath her night-gown.
+
+At length a dread of Evelina's return began to mingle with these
+musings. How could she meet her younger sister's eye without betraying
+what had happened? She felt as though a visible glory lay on her, and
+she was glad that dusk had fallen when Evelina entered. But her fears
+were superfluous. Evelina, always self-absorbed, had of late lost all
+interest in the simple happenings of the shop, and Ann Eliza, with
+mingled mortification and relief, perceived that she was in no danger of
+being cross-questioned as to the events of the afternoon. She was
+glad of this; yet there was a touch of humiliation in finding that the
+portentous secret in her bosom did not visibly shine forth. It struck
+her as dull, and even slightly absurd, of Evelina not to know at last
+that they were equals.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Mr. Ramy, after a decent interval, returned to the shop; and Ann Eliza,
+when they met, was unable to detect whether the emotions which seethed
+under her black alpaca found an echo in his bosom. Outwardly he made no
+sign. He lit his pipe as placidly as ever and seemed to relapse without
+effort into the unruffled intimacy of old. Yet to Ann Eliza's initiated
+eye a change became gradually perceptible. She saw that he was beginning
+to look at her sister as he had looked at her on that momentous
+afternoon: she even discerned a secret significance in the turn of his
+talk with Evelina. Once he asked her abruptly if she should like
+to travel, and Ann Eliza saw that the flush on Evelina's cheek was
+reflected from the same fire which had scorched her own.
+
+So they drifted on through the sultry weeks of July. At that season the
+business of the little shop almost ceased, and one Saturday morning Mr.
+Ramy proposed that the sisters should lock up early and go with him for
+a sail down the bay in one of the Coney Island boats.
+
+Ann Eliza saw the light in Evelina's eye and her resolve was instantly
+taken.
+
+"I guess I won't go, thank you kindly; but I'm sure my sister will be
+happy to."
+
+She was pained by the perfunctory phrase with which Evelina urged her to
+accompany them; and still more by Mr. Ramy's silence.
+
+"No, I guess I won't go," she repeated, rather in answer to herself than
+to them. "It's dreadfully hot and I've got a kinder headache."
+
+"Oh, well, I wouldn't then," said her sister hurriedly. "You'd better
+jest set here quietly and rest."
+
+"Yes, I'll rest," Ann Eliza assented.
+
+At two o'clock Mr. Ramy returned, and a moment later he and Evelina left
+the shop. Evelina had made herself another new bonnet for the occasion,
+a bonnet, Ann Eliza thought, almost too youthful in shape and colour.
+It was the first time it had ever occurred to her to criticize Evelina's
+taste, and she was frightened at the insidious change in her attitude
+toward her sister.
+
+When Ann Eliza, in later days, looked back on that afternoon she felt
+that there had been something prophetic in the quality of its solitude;
+it seemed to distill the triple essence of loneliness in which all her
+after-life was to be lived. No purchasers came; not a hand fell on
+the door-latch; and the tick of the clock in the back room ironically
+emphasized the passing of the empty hours.
+
+Evelina returned late and alone. Ann Eliza felt the coming crisis in the
+sound of her footstep, which wavered along as if not knowing on what it
+trod. The elder sister's affection had so passionately projected itself
+into her junior's fate that at such moments she seemed to be living
+two lives, her own and Evelina's; and her private longings shrank into
+silence at the sight of the other's hungry bliss. But it was evident
+that Evelina, never acutely alive to the emotional atmosphere about her,
+had no idea that her secret was suspected; and with an assumption of
+unconcern that would have made Ann Eliza smile if the pang had been less
+piercing, the younger sister prepared to confess herself.
+
+"What are you so busy about?" she said impatiently, as Ann Eliza,
+beneath the gas-jet, fumbled for the matches. "Ain't you even got time
+to ask me if I'd had a pleasant day?"
+
+Ann Eliza turned with a quiet smile. "I guess I don't have to. Seems to
+me it's pretty plain you have."
+
+"Well, I don't know. I don't know HOW I feel--it's all so queer. I
+almost think I'd like to scream."
+
+"I guess you're tired."
+
+"No, I ain't. It's not that. But it all happened so suddenly, and the
+boat was so crowded I thought everybody'd hear what he was saying.--Ann
+Eliza," she broke out, "why on earth don't you ask me what I'm talking
+about?"
+
+Ann Eliza, with a last effort of heroism, feigned a fond
+incomprehension.
+
+"What ARE you?"
+
+"Why, I'm engaged to be married--so there! Now it's out! And it happened
+right on the boat; only to think of it! Of course I wasn't exactly
+surprised--I've known right along he was going to sooner or later--on'y
+somehow I didn't think of its happening to-day. I thought he'd never get
+up his courage. He said he was so 'fraid I'd say no--that's what kep'
+him so long from asking me. Well, I ain't said yes YET--leastways I told
+him I'd have to think it over; but I guess he knows. Oh, Ann Eliza, I'm
+so happy!" She hid the blinding brightness of her face.
+
+Ann Eliza, just then, would only let herself feel that she was glad. She
+drew down Evelina's hands and kissed her, and they held each other. When
+Evelina regained her voice she had a tale to tell which carried their
+vigil far into the night. Not a syllable, not a glance or gesture of
+Ramy's, was the elder sister spared; and with unconscious irony she
+found herself comparing the details of his proposal to her with those
+which Evelina was imparting with merciless prolixity.
+
+The next few days were taken up with the embarrassed adjustment of their
+new relation to Mr. Ramy and to each other. Ann Eliza's ardour carried
+her to new heights of self-effacement, and she invented late duties in
+the shop in order to leave Evelina and her suitor longer alone in the
+back room. Later on, when she tried to remember the details of those
+first days, few came back to her: she knew only that she got up each
+morning with the sense of having to push the leaden hours up the same
+long steep of pain.
+
+Mr. Ramy came daily now. Every evening he and his betrothed went out
+for a stroll around the Square, and when Evelina came in her cheeks were
+always pink. "He's kissed her under that tree at the corner, away from
+the lamp-post," Ann Eliza said to herself, with sudden insight into
+unconjectured things. On Sundays they usually went for the whole
+afternoon to the Central Park, and Ann Eliza, from her seat in the
+mortal hush of the back room, followed step by step their long slow
+beatific walk.
+
+There had been, as yet, no allusion to their marriage, except that
+Evelina had once told her sister that Mr. Ramy wished them to invite
+Mrs. Hochmuller and Linda to the wedding. The mention of the laundress
+raised a half-forgotten fear in Ann Eliza, and she said in a tone of
+tentative appeal: "I guess if I was you I wouldn't want to be very great
+friends with Mrs. Hochmuller."
+
+Evelina glanced at her compassionately. "I guess if you was me you'd
+want to do everything you could to please the man you loved. It's
+lucky," she added with glacial irony, "that I'm not too grand for
+Herman's friends."
+
+"Oh," Ann Eliza protested, "that ain't what I mean--and you know it
+ain't. Only somehow the day we saw her I didn't think she seemed like
+the kinder person you'd want for a friend."
+
+"I guess a married woman's the best judge of such matters," Evelina
+replied, as though she already walked in the light of her future state.
+
+Ann Eliza, after that, kept her own counsel. She saw that Evelina wanted
+her sympathy as little as her admonitions, and that already she counted
+for nothing in her sister's scheme of life. To Ann Eliza's idolatrous
+acceptance of the cruelties of fate this exclusion seemed both natural
+and just; but it caused her the most lively pain. She could not divest
+her love for Evelina of its passionate motherliness; no breath of reason
+could lower it to the cool temperature of sisterly affection.
+
+She was then passing, as she thought, through the novitiate of her pain;
+preparing, in a hundred experimental ways, for the solitude awaiting her
+when Evelina left. It was true that it would be a tempered loneliness.
+They would not be far apart. Evelina would "run in" daily from the
+clock-maker's; they would doubtless take supper with her on Sundays. But
+already Ann Eliza guessed with what growing perfunctoriness her sister
+would fulfill these obligations; she even foresaw the day when, to get
+news of Evelina, she should have to lock the shop at nightfall and go
+herself to Mr. Ramy's door. But on that contingency she would not dwell.
+"They can come to me when they want to--they'll always find me here,"
+she simply said to herself.
+
+One evening Evelina came in flushed and agitated from her stroll around
+the Square. Ann Eliza saw at once that something had happened; but the
+new habit of reticence checked her question.
+
+She had not long to wait. "Oh, Ann Eliza, on'y to think what he says--"
+(the pronoun stood exclusively for Mr. Ramy). "I declare I'm so upset I
+thought the people in the Square would notice me. Don't I look queer? He
+wants to get married right off--this very next week."
+
+"Next week?"
+
+"Yes. So's we can move out to St. Louis right away."
+
+"Him and you--move out to St. Louis?"
+
+"Well, I don't know as it would be natural for him to want to go out
+there without me," Evelina simpered. "But it's all so sudden I don't
+know what to think. He only got the letter this morning. DO I look
+queer, Ann Eliza?" Her eye was roving for the mirror.
+
+"No, you don't," said Ann Eliza almost harshly.
+
+"Well, it's a mercy," Evelina pursued with a tinge of disappointment.
+"It's a regular miracle I didn't faint right out there in the Square.
+Herman's so thoughtless--he just put the letter into my hand without a
+word. It's from a big firm out there--the Tiff'ny of St. Louis, he says
+it is--offering him a place in their clock-department. Seems they heard
+of him through a German friend of his that's settled out there. It's a
+splendid opening, and if he gives satisfaction they'll raise him at the
+end of the year."
+
+She paused, flushed with the importance of the situation, which seemed
+to lift her once for all above the dull level of her former life.
+
+"Then you'll have to go?" came at last from Ann Eliza.
+
+Evelina stared. "You wouldn't have me interfere with his prospects,
+would you?"
+
+"No--no. I on'y meant--has it got to be so soon?"
+
+"Right away, I tell you--next week. Ain't it awful?" blushed the bride.
+
+Well, this was what happened to mothers. They bore it, Ann Eliza mused;
+so why not she? Ah, but they had their own chance first; she had had no
+chance at all. And now this life which she had made her own was going
+from her forever; had gone, already, in the inner and deeper sense, and
+was soon to vanish in even its outward nearness, its surface-communion
+of voice and eye. At that moment even the thought of Evelina's happiness
+refused her its consolatory ray; or its light, if she saw it, was too
+remote to warm her. The thirst for a personal and inalienable tie, for
+pangs and problems of her own, was parching Ann Eliza's soul: it seemed
+to her that she could never again gather strength to look her loneliness
+in the face.
+
+The trivial obligations of the moment came to her aid. Nursed in
+idleness her grief would have mastered her; but the needs of the shop
+and the back room, and the preparations for Evelina's marriage, kept the
+tyrant under.
+
+Miss Mellins, true to her anticipations, had been called on to aid in
+the making of the wedding dress, and she and Ann Eliza were bending one
+evening over the breadths of pearl-grey cashmere which in spite of the
+dress-maker's prophetic vision of gored satin, had been judged most
+suitable, when Evelina came into the room alone.
+
+Ann Eliza had already had occasion to notice that it was a bad sign when
+Mr. Ramy left his affianced at the door. It generally meant that Evelina
+had something disturbing to communicate, and Ann Eliza's first glance
+told her that this time the news was grave.
+
+Miss Mellins, who sat with her back to the door and her head bent over
+her sewing, started as Evelina came around to the opposite side of the
+table.
+
+"Mercy, Miss Evelina! I declare I thought you was a ghost, the way you
+crep' in. I had a customer once up in Forty-ninth Street--a lovely young
+woman with a thirty-six bust and a waist you could ha' put into her
+wedding ring--and her husband, he crep' up behind her that way jest for
+a joke, and frightened her into a fit, and when she come to she was a
+raving maniac, and had to be taken to Bloomingdale with two doctors and
+a nurse to hold her in the carriage, and a lovely baby on'y six weeks
+old--and there she is to this day, poor creature."
+
+"I didn't mean to startle you," said Evelina.
+
+She sat down on the nearest chair, and as the lamp-light fell on her
+face Ann Eliza saw that she had been crying.
+
+"You do look dead-beat," Miss Mellins resumed, after a pause of
+soul-probing scrutiny. "I guess Mr. Ramy lugs you round that Square too
+often. You'll walk your legs off if you ain't careful. Men don't never
+consider--they're all alike. Why, I had a cousin once that was engaged
+to a book-agent--"
+
+"Maybe we'd better put away the work for to-night, Miss Mellins," Ann
+Eliza interposed. "I guess what Evelina wants is a good night's rest."
+
+"That's so," assented the dress-maker. "Have you got the back breadths
+run together, Miss Bunner? Here's the sleeves. I'll pin 'em together."
+She drew a cluster of pins from her mouth, in which she seemed to
+secrete them as squirrels stow away nuts. "There," she said, rolling up
+her work, "you go right away to bed, Miss Evelina, and we'll set up a
+little later to-morrow night. I guess you're a mite nervous, ain't you?
+I know when my turn comes I'll be scared to death."
+
+With this arch forecast she withdrew, and Ann Eliza, returning to the
+back room, found Evelina still listlessly seated by the table. True to
+her new policy of silence, the elder sister set about folding up the
+bridal dress; but suddenly Evelina said in a harsh unnatural voice:
+"There ain't any use in going on with that."
+
+The folds slipped from Ann Eliza's hands.
+
+"Evelina Bunner--what you mean?"
+
+"Jest what I say. It's put off."
+
+"Put off--what's put off?"
+
+"Our getting married. He can't take me to St. Louis. He ain't got money
+enough." She brought the words out in the monotonous tone of a child
+reciting a lesson.
+
+Ann Eliza picked up another breadth of cashmere and began to smooth it
+out. "I don't understand," she said at length.
+
+"Well, it's plain enough. The journey's fearfully expensive, and we've
+got to have something left to start with when we get out there. We've
+counted up, and he ain't got the money to do it--that's all."
+
+"But I thought he was going right into a splendid place."
+
+"So he is; but the salary's pretty low the first year, and board's very
+high in St. Louis. He's jest got another letter from his German friend,
+and he's been figuring it out, and he's afraid to chance it. He'll have
+to go alone."
+
+"But there's your money--have you forgotten that? The hundred dollars in
+the bank."
+
+Evelina made an impatient movement. "Of course I ain't forgotten it.
+On'y it ain't enough. It would all have to go into buying furniture,
+and if he was took sick and lost his place again we wouldn't have a cent
+left. He says he's got to lay by another hundred dollars before he'll be
+willing to take me out there."
+
+For a while Ann Eliza pondered this surprising statement; then she
+ventured: "Seems to me he might have thought of it before."
+
+In an instant Evelina was aflame. "I guess he knows what's right as well
+as you or me. I'd sooner die than be a burden to him."
+
+Ann Eliza made no answer. The clutch of an unformulated doubt had
+checked the words on her lips. She had meant, on the day of her sister's
+marriage, to give Evelina the other half of their common savings; but
+something warned her not to say so now.
+
+The sisters undressed without farther words. After they had gone to bed,
+and the light had been put out, the sound of Evelina's weeping came to
+Ann Eliza in the darkness, but she lay motionless on her own side of the
+bed, out of contact with her sister's shaken body. Never had she felt so
+coldly remote from Evelina.
+
+The hours of the night moved slowly, ticked off with wearisome
+insistence by the clock which had played so prominent a part in their
+lives. Evelina's sobs still stirred the bed at gradually lengthening
+intervals, till at length Ann Eliza thought she slept. But with the dawn
+the eyes of the sisters met, and Ann Eliza's courage failed her as she
+looked in Evelina's face.
+
+She sat up in bed and put out a pleading hand.
+
+"Don't cry so, dearie. Don't."
+
+"Oh, I can't bear it, I can't bear it," Evelina moaned.
+
+Ann Eliza stroked her quivering shoulder. "Don't, don't," she repeated.
+"If you take the other hundred, won't that be enough? I always meant to
+give it to you. On'y I didn't want to tell you till your wedding day."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Evelina's marriage took place on the appointed day. It was celebrated
+in the evening, in the chantry of the church which the sisters attended,
+and after it was over the few guests who had been present repaired to
+the Bunner Sisters' basement, where a wedding supper awaited them. Ann
+Eliza, aided by Miss Mellins and Mrs. Hawkins, and consciously supported
+by the sentimental interest of the whole street, had expended her utmost
+energy on the decoration of the shop and the back room. On the table a
+vase of white chrysanthemums stood between a dish of oranges and bananas
+and an iced wedding-cake wreathed with orange-blossoms of the bride's
+own making. Autumn leaves studded with paper roses festooned the
+what-not and the chromo of the Rock of Ages, and a wreath of yellow
+immortelles was twined about the clock which Evelina revered as the
+mysterious agent of her happiness.
+
+At the table sat Miss Mellins, profusely spangled and bangled, her head
+sewing-girl, a pale young thing who had helped with Evelina's outfit,
+Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, with Johnny, their eldest boy, and Mrs. Hochmuller
+and her daughter.
+
+Mrs. Hochmuller's large blonde personality seemed to pervade the room
+to the effacement of the less amply-proportioned guests. It was rendered
+more impressive by a dress of crimson poplin that stood out from her in
+organ-like folds; and Linda, whom Ann Eliza had remembered as an
+uncouth child with a sly look about the eyes, surprised her by a sudden
+blossoming into feminine grace such as sometimes follows on a gawky
+girlhood. The Hochmullers, in fact, struck the dominant note in the
+entertainment. Beside them Evelina, unusually pale in her grey cashmere
+and white bonnet, looked like a faintly washed sketch beside a brilliant
+chromo; and Mr. Ramy, doomed to the traditional insignificance of the
+bridegroom's part, made no attempt to rise above his situation.
+Even Miss Mellins sparkled and jingled in vain in the shadow of
+Mrs. Hochmuller's crimson bulk; and Ann Eliza, with a sense of vague
+foreboding, saw that the wedding feast centred about the two guests she
+had most wished to exclude from it. What was said or done while they
+all sat about the table she never afterward recalled: the long hours
+remained in her memory as a whirl of high colours and loud voices, from
+which the pale presence of Evelina now and then emerged like a drowned
+face on a sunset-dabbled sea.
+
+The next morning Mr. Ramy and his wife started for St. Louis, and Ann
+Eliza was left alone. Outwardly the first strain of parting was tempered
+by the arrival of Miss Mellins, Mrs. Hawkins and Johnny, who dropped in
+to help in the ungarlanding and tidying up of the back room. Ann Eliza
+was duly grateful for their kindness, but the "talking over" on which
+they had evidently counted was Dead Sea fruit on her lips; and just
+beyond the familiar warmth of their presences she saw the form of
+Solitude at her door.
+
+Ann Eliza was but a small person to harbour so great a guest, and a
+trembling sense of insufficiency possessed her. She had no high musings
+to offer to the new companion of her hearth. Every one of her thoughts
+had hitherto turned to Evelina and shaped itself in homely easy words;
+of the mighty speech of silence she knew not the earliest syllable.
+
+Everything in the back room and the shop, on the second day after
+Evelina's going, seemed to have grown coldly unfamiliar. The whole
+aspect of the place had changed with the changed conditions of Ann
+Eliza's life. The first customer who opened the shop-door startled her
+like a ghost; and all night she lay tossing on her side of the bed,
+sinking now and then into an uncertain doze from which she would
+suddenly wake to reach out her hand for Evelina. In the new silence
+surrounding her the walls and furniture found voice, frightening her
+at dusk and midnight with strange sighs and stealthy whispers. Ghostly
+hands shook the window shutters or rattled at the outer latch, and once
+she grew cold at the sound of a step like Evelina's stealing through the
+dark shop to die out on the threshold. In time, of course, she found
+an explanation for these noises, telling herself that the bedstead was
+warping, that Miss Mellins trod heavily overhead, or that the thunder of
+passing beer-waggons shook the door-latch; but the hours leading up to
+these conclusions were full of the floating terrors that harden into
+fixed foreboding. Worst of all were the solitary meals, when she
+absently continued to set aside the largest slice of pie for Evelina,
+and to let the tea grow cold while she waited for her sister to help
+herself to the first cup. Miss Mellins, coming in on one of these sad
+repasts, suggested the acquisition of a cat; but Ann Eliza shook
+her head. She had never been used to animals, and she felt the vague
+shrinking of the pious from creatures divided from her by the abyss of
+soullessness.
+
+At length, after ten empty days, Evelina's first letter came.
+
+"My dear Sister," she wrote, in her pinched Spencerian hand, "it seems
+strange to be in this great City so far from home alone with him I have
+chosen for life, but marriage has its solemn duties which those who are
+not can never hope to understand, and happier perhaps for this reason,
+life for them has only simple tasks and pleasures, but those who must
+take thought for others must be prepared to do their duty in whatever
+station it has pleased the Almighty to call them. Not that I have cause
+to complain, my dear Husband is all love and devotion, but being absent
+all day at his business how can I help but feel lonesome at times, as
+the poet says it is hard for they that love to live apart, and I often
+wonder, my dear Sister, how you are getting along alone in the store,
+may you never experience the feelings of solitude I have underwent since
+I came here. We are boarding now, but soon expect to find rooms and
+change our place of Residence, then I shall have all the care of a
+household to bear, but such is the fate of those who join their Lot with
+others, they cannot hope to escape from the burdens of Life, nor would
+I ask it, I would not live alway but while I live would always pray for
+strength to do my duty. This city is not near as large or handsome as
+New York, but had my lot been cast in a Wilderness I hope I should
+not repine, such never was my nature, and they who exchange their
+independence for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is
+not gold that glitters, nor I would not expect like you to drift down
+the stream of Life unfettered and serene as a Summer cloud, such is
+not my fate, but come what may will always find in me a resigned and
+prayerful Spirit, and hoping this finds you as well as it leaves me, I
+remain, my dear Sister,
+
+"Yours truly,
+
+"EVELINA B. RAMY."
+
+
+Ann Eliza had always secretly admired the oratorical and impersonal tone
+of Evelina's letters; but the few she had previously read, having been
+addressed to school-mates or distant relatives, had appeared in the
+light of literary compositions rather than as records of personal
+experience. Now she could not but wish that Evelina had laid aside her
+swelling periods for a style more suited to the chronicling of homely
+incidents. She read the letter again and again, seeking for a clue to
+what her sister was really doing and thinking; but after each reading
+she emerged impressed but unenlightened from the labyrinth of Evelina's
+eloquence.
+
+During the early winter she received two or three more letters of the
+same kind, each enclosing in its loose husk of rhetoric a smaller kernel
+of fact. By dint of patient interlinear study, Ann Eliza gathered from
+them that Evelina and her husband, after various costly experiments in
+boarding, had been reduced to a tenement-house flat; that living in St.
+Louis was more expensive than they had supposed, and that Mr. Ramy was
+kept out late at night (why, at a jeweller's, Ann Eliza wondered?) and
+found his position less satisfactory than he had been led to expect.
+Toward February the letters fell off; and finally they ceased to come.
+
+At first Ann Eliza wrote, shyly but persistently, entreating for more
+frequent news; then, as one appeal after another was swallowed up in the
+mystery of Evelina's protracted silence, vague fears began to assail the
+elder sister. Perhaps Evelina was ill, and with no one to nurse her but
+a man who could not even make himself a cup of tea! Ann Eliza recalled
+the layer of dust in Mr. Ramy's shop, and pictures of domestic disorder
+mingled with the more poignant vision of her sister's illness. But
+surely if Evelina were ill Mr. Ramy would have written. He wrote a
+small neat hand, and epistolary communication was not an insuperable
+embarrassment to him. The too probable alternative was that both
+the unhappy pair had been prostrated by some disease which left them
+powerless to summon her--for summon her they surely would, Ann Eliza
+with unconscious cynicism reflected, if she or her small economies could
+be of use to them! The more she strained her eyes into the mystery, the
+darker it grew; and her lack of initiative, her inability to imagine
+what steps might be taken to trace the lost in distant places, left her
+benumbed and helpless.
+
+At last there floated up from some depth of troubled memory the name
+of the firm of St. Louis jewellers by whom Mr. Ramy was employed. After
+much hesitation, and considerable effort, she addressed to them a timid
+request for news of her brother-in-law; and sooner than she could have
+hoped the answer reached her.
+
+"DEAR MADAM,
+
+"In reply to yours of the 29th ult. we beg to state the party you refer
+to was discharged from our employ a month ago. We are sorry we are
+unable to furnish you wish his address.
+
+"Yours Respectfully,
+
+"LUDWIG AND HAMMERBUSCH."
+
+
+Ann Eliza read and re-read the curt statement in a stupor of distress.
+She had lost her last trace of Evelina. All that night she lay awake,
+revolving the stupendous project of going to St. Louis in search of her
+sister; but though she pieced together her few financial possibilities
+with the ingenuity of a brain used to fitting odd scraps into patch-work
+quilts, she woke to the cold daylight fact that she could not raise the
+money for her fare. Her wedding gift to Evelina had left her without any
+resources beyond her daily earnings, and these had steadily dwindled as
+the winter passed. She had long since renounced her weekly visit to the
+butcher, and had reduced her other expenses to the narrowest measure;
+but the most systematic frugality had not enabled her to put by any
+money. In spite of her dogged efforts to maintain the prosperity of the
+little shop, her sister's absence had already told on its business.
+Now that Ann Eliza had to carry the bundles to the dyer's herself, the
+customers who called in her absence, finding the shop locked, too often
+went elsewhere. Moreover, after several stern but unavailing efforts,
+she had had to give up the trimming of bonnets, which in Evelina's hands
+had been the most lucrative as well as the most interesting part of the
+business. This change, to the passing female eye, robbed the shop window
+of its chief attraction; and when painful experience had convinced the
+regular customers of the Bunner Sisters of Ann Eliza's lack of millinery
+skill they began to lose faith in her ability to curl a feather or even
+"freshen up" a bunch of flowers. The time came when Ann Eliza had almost
+made up her mind to speak to the lady with puffed sleeves, who had
+always looked at her so kindly, and had once ordered a hat of Evelina.
+Perhaps the lady with puffed sleeves would be able to get her a little
+plain sewing to do; or she might recommend the shop to friends. Ann
+Eliza, with this possibility in view, rummaged out of a drawer the
+fly-blown remainder of the business cards which the sisters had ordered
+in the first flush of their commercial adventure; but when the lady with
+puffed sleeves finally appeared she was in deep mourning, and wore
+so sad a look that Ann Eliza dared not speak. She came in to buy some
+spools of black thread and silk, and in the doorway she turned back to
+say: "I am going away to-morrow for a long time. I hope you will have a
+pleasant winter." And the door shut on her.
+
+One day not long after this it occurred to Ann Eliza to go to Hoboken in
+quest of Mrs. Hochmuller. Much as she shrank from pouring her distress
+into that particular ear, her anxiety had carried her beyond such
+reluctance; but when she began to think the matter over she was faced by
+a new difficulty. On the occasion of her only visit to Mrs. Hochmuller,
+she and Evelina had suffered themselves to be led there by Mr. Ramy;
+and Ann Eliza now perceived that she did not even know the name of the
+laundress's suburb, much less that of the street in which she lived.
+But she must have news of Evelina, and no obstacle was great enough to
+thwart her.
+
+Though she longed to turn to some one for advice she disliked to expose
+her situation to Miss Mellins's searching eye, and at first she could
+think of no other confidant. Then she remembered Mrs. Hawkins, or
+rather her husband, who, though Ann Eliza had always thought him a
+dull uneducated man, was probably gifted with the mysterious masculine
+faculty of finding out people's addresses. It went hard with Ann Eliza
+to trust her secret even to the mild ear of Mrs. Hawkins, but at least
+she was spared the cross-examination to which the dress-maker would
+have subjected her. The accumulating pressure of domestic cares had so
+crushed in Mrs. Hawkins any curiosity concerning the affairs of others
+that she received her visitor's confidence with an almost masculine
+indifference, while she rocked her teething baby on one arm and with the
+other tried to check the acrobatic impulses of the next in age.
+
+"My, my," she simply said as Ann Eliza ended. "Keep still now, Arthur:
+Miss Bunner don't want you to jump up and down on her foot to-day. And
+what are you gaping at, Johnny? Run right off and play," she added,
+turning sternly to her eldest, who, because he was the least naughty,
+usually bore the brunt of her wrath against the others.
+
+"Well, perhaps Mr. Hawkins can help you," Mrs. Hawkins continued
+meditatively, while the children, after scattering at her bidding,
+returned to their previous pursuits like flies settling down on the
+spot from which an exasperated hand has swept them. "I'll send him right
+round the minute he comes in, and you can tell him the whole story. I
+wouldn't wonder but what he can find that Mrs. Hochmuller's address in
+the d'rectory. I know they've got one where he works."
+
+"I'd be real thankful if he could," Ann Eliza murmured, rising from her
+seat with the factitious sense of lightness that comes from imparting a
+long-hidden dread.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Mr. Hawkins proved himself worthy of his wife's faith in his capacity.
+He learned from Ann Eliza as much as she could tell him about Mrs.
+Hochmuller and returned the next evening with a scrap of paper bearing
+her address, beneath which Johnny (the family scribe) had written in a
+large round hand the names of the streets that led there from the ferry.
+
+Ann Eliza lay awake all that night, repeating over and over again the
+directions Mr. Hawkins had given her. He was a kind man, and she knew
+he would willingly have gone with her to Hoboken; indeed she read in his
+timid eye the half-formed intention of offering to accompany her--but on
+such an errand she preferred to go alone.
+
+The next Sunday, accordingly, she set out early, and without much
+trouble found her way to the ferry. Nearly a year had passed since her
+previous visit to Mrs. Hochmuller, and a chilly April breeze smote her
+face as she stepped on the boat. Most of the passengers were huddled
+together in the cabin, and Ann Eliza shrank into its obscurest corner,
+shivering under the thin black mantle which had seemed so hot in July.
+She began to feel a little bewildered as she stepped ashore, but a
+paternal policeman put her into the right car, and as in a dream she
+found herself retracing the way to Mrs. Hochmuller's door. She had told
+the conductor the name of the street at which she wished to get out,
+and presently she stood in the biting wind at the corner near the
+beer-saloon, where the sun had once beat down on her so fiercely. At
+length an empty car appeared, its yellow flank emblazoned with the name
+of Mrs. Hochmuller's suburb, and Ann Eliza was presently jolting past
+the narrow brick houses islanded between vacant lots like giant piles in
+a desolate lagoon. When the car reached the end of its journey she got
+out and stood for some time trying to remember which turn Mr. Ramy had
+taken. She had just made up her mind to ask the car-driver when he shook
+the reins on the backs of his lean horses, and the car, still empty,
+jogged away toward Hoboken.
+
+Ann Eliza, left alone by the roadside, began to move cautiously
+forward, looking about for a small red house with a gable overhung by an
+elm-tree; but everything about her seemed unfamiliar and forbidding. One
+or two surly looking men slouched past with inquisitive glances, and she
+could not make up her mind to stop and speak to them.
+
+At length a tow-headed boy came out of a swinging door suggestive of
+illicit conviviality, and to him Ann Eliza ventured to confide
+her difficulty. The offer of five cents fired him with an instant
+willingness to lead her to Mrs. Hochmuller, and he was soon trotting
+past the stone-cutter's yard with Ann Eliza in his wake.
+
+Another turn in the road brought them to the little red house, and
+having rewarded her guide Ann Eliza unlatched the gate and walked up to
+the door. Her heart was beating violently, and she had to lean against
+the door-post to compose her twitching lips: she had not known till that
+moment how much it was going to hurt her to speak of Evelina to Mrs.
+Hochmuller. As her agitation subsided she began to notice how much the
+appearance of the house had changed. It was not only that winter had
+stripped the elm, and blackened the flower-borders: the house itself had
+a debased and deserted air. The window-panes were cracked and dirty, and
+one or two shutters swung dismally on loosened hinges.
+
+She rang several times before the door was opened. At length an Irish
+woman with a shawl over her head and a baby in her arms appeared on the
+threshold, and glancing past her into the narrow passage Ann Eliza saw
+that Mrs. Hochmuller's neat abode had deteriorated as much within as
+without.
+
+At the mention of the name the woman stared. "Mrs. who, did ye say?"
+
+"Mrs. Hochmuller. This is surely her house?"
+
+"No, it ain't neither," said the woman turning away.
+
+"Oh, but wait, please," Ann Eliza entreated. "I can't be mistaken. I
+mean the Mrs. Hochmuller who takes in washing. I came out to see her
+last June."
+
+"Oh, the Dutch washerwoman is it--her that used to live here? She's been
+gone two months and more. It's Mike McNulty lives here now. Whisht!" to
+the baby, who had squared his mouth for a howl.
+
+Ann Eliza's knees grew weak. "Mrs. Hochmuller gone? But where has she
+gone? She must be somewhere round here. Can't you tell me?"
+
+"Sure an' I can't," said the woman. "She wint away before iver we come."
+
+"Dalia Geoghegan, will ye bring the choild in out av the cowld?" cried
+an irate voice from within.
+
+"Please wait--oh, please wait," Ann Eliza insisted. "You see I must find
+Mrs. Hochmuller."
+
+"Why don't ye go and look for her thin?" the woman returned, slamming
+the door in her face.
+
+She stood motionless on the door-step, dazed by the immensity of her
+disappointment, till a burst of loud voices inside the house drove her
+down the path and out of the gate.
+
+Even then she could not grasp what had happened, and pausing in the road
+she looked back at the house, half hoping that Mrs. Hochmuller's once
+detested face might appear at one of the grimy windows.
+
+She was roused by an icy wind that seemed to spring up suddenly from the
+desolate scene, piercing her thin dress like gauze; and turning away she
+began to retrace her steps. She thought of enquiring for Mrs. Hochmuller
+at some of the neighbouring houses, but their look was so unfriendly
+that she walked on without making up her mind at which door to ring.
+When she reached the horse-car terminus a car was just moving off toward
+Hoboken, and for nearly an hour she had to wait on the corner in the
+bitter wind. Her hands and feet were stiff with cold when the car at
+length loomed into sight again, and she thought of stopping somewhere
+on the way to the ferry for a cup of tea; but before the region of
+lunch-rooms was reached she had grown so sick and dizzy that the thought
+of food was repulsive. At length she found herself on the ferry-boat, in
+the soothing stuffiness of the crowded cabin; then came another interval
+of shivering on a street-corner, another long jolting journey in a
+"cross-town" car that smelt of damp straw and tobacco; and lastly, in
+the cold spring dusk, she unlocked her door and groped her way through
+the shop to her fireless bedroom.
+
+The next morning Mrs. Hawkins, dropping in to hear the result of the
+trip, found Ann Eliza sitting behind the counter wrapped in an old
+shawl.
+
+"Why, Miss Bunner, you're sick! You must have fever--your face is just
+as red!"
+
+"It's nothing. I guess I caught cold yesterday on the ferry-boat," Ann
+Eliza acknowledged.
+
+"And it's jest like a vault in here!" Mrs. Hawkins rebuked her. "Let me
+feel your hand--it's burning. Now, Miss Bunner, you've got to go right
+to bed this very minute."
+
+"Oh, but I can't, Mrs. Hawkins." Ann Eliza attempted a wan smile. "You
+forget there ain't nobody but me to tend the store."
+
+"I guess you won't tend it long neither, if you ain't careful," Mrs.
+Hawkins grimly rejoined. Beneath her placid exterior she cherished
+a morbid passion for disease and death, and the sight of Ann Eliza's
+suffering had roused her from her habitual indifference. "There ain't
+so many folks comes to the store anyhow," she went on with unconscious
+cruelty, "and I'll go right up and see if Miss Mellins can't spare one
+of her girls."
+
+Ann Eliza, too weary to resist, allowed Mrs. Hawkins to put her to
+bed and make a cup of tea over the stove, while Miss Mellins, always
+good-naturedly responsive to any appeal for help, sent down the
+weak-eyed little girl to deal with hypothetical customers.
+
+Ann Eliza, having so far abdicated her independence, sank into sudden
+apathy. As far as she could remember, it was the first time in her life
+that she had been taken care of instead of taking care, and there was
+a momentary relief in the surrender. She swallowed the tea like an
+obedient child, allowed a poultice to be applied to her aching chest and
+uttered no protest when a fire was kindled in the rarely used grate; but
+as Mrs. Hawkins bent over to "settle" her pillows she raised herself on
+her elbow to whisper: "Oh, Mrs. Hawkins, Mrs. Hochmuller warn't there."
+The tears rolled down her cheeks.
+
+"She warn't there? Has she moved?"
+
+"Over two months ago--and they don't know where she's gone. Oh what'll I
+do, Mrs. Hawkins?"
+
+"There, there, Miss Bunner. You lay still and don't fret. I'll ask Mr.
+Hawkins soon as ever he comes home."
+
+Ann Eliza murmured her gratitude, and Mrs. Hawkins, bending down, kissed
+her on the forehead. "Don't you fret," she repeated, in the voice with
+which she soothed her children.
+
+For over a week Ann Eliza lay in bed, faithfully nursed by her two
+neighbours, while the weak-eyed child, and the pale sewing girl who
+had helped to finish Evelina's wedding dress, took turns in minding the
+shop. Every morning, when her friends appeared, Ann Eliza lifted her
+head to ask: "Is there a letter?" and at their gentle negative sank back
+in silence. Mrs. Hawkins, for several days, spoke no more of her promise
+to consult her husband as to the best way of tracing Mrs. Hochmuller;
+and dread of fresh disappointment kept Ann Eliza from bringing up the
+subject.
+
+But the following Sunday evening, as she sat for the first time
+bolstered up in her rocking-chair near the stove, while Miss Mellins
+studied the Police Gazette beneath the lamp, there came a knock on the
+shop-door and Mr. Hawkins entered.
+
+Ann Eliza's first glance at his plain friendly face showed her he had
+news to give, but though she no longer attempted to hide her anxiety
+from Miss Mellins, her lips trembled too much to let her speak.
+
+"Good evening, Miss Bunner," said Mr. Hawkins in his dragging voice.
+"I've been over to Hoboken all day looking round for Mrs. Hochmuller."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Hawkins--you HAVE?"
+
+"I made a thorough search, but I'm sorry to say it was no use. She's
+left Hoboken--moved clear away, and nobody seems to know where."
+
+"It was real good of you, Mr. Hawkins." Ann Eliza's voice struggled up
+in a faint whisper through the submerging tide of her disappointment.
+
+Mr. Hawkins, in his embarrassed sense of being the bringer of bad news,
+stood before her uncertainly; then he turned to go. "No trouble at all,"
+he paused to assure her from the doorway.
+
+She wanted to speak again, to detain him, to ask him to advise her; but
+the words caught in her throat and she lay back silent.
+
+The next day she got up early, and dressed and bonneted herself with
+twitching fingers. She waited till the weak-eyed child appeared, and
+having laid on her minute instructions as to the care of the shop, she
+slipped out into the street. It had occurred to her in one of the weary
+watches of the previous night that she might go to Tiffany's and make
+enquiries about Ramy's past. Possibly in that way she might obtain some
+information that would suggest a new way of reaching Evelina. She was
+guiltily aware that Mrs. Hawkins and Miss Mellins would be angry with
+her for venturing out of doors, but she knew she should never feel any
+better till she had news of Evelina.
+
+The morning air was sharp, and as she turned to face the wind she felt
+so weak and unsteady that she wondered if she should ever get as far
+as Union Square; but by walking very slowly, and standing still now and
+then when she could do so without being noticed, she found herself at
+last before the jeweller's great glass doors.
+
+It was still so early that there were no purchasers in the shop, and
+she felt herself the centre of innumerable unemployed eyes as she moved
+forward between long lines of show-cases glittering with diamonds and
+silver.
+
+She was glancing about in the hope of finding the clock-department
+without having to approach one of the impressive gentlemen who paced
+the empty aisles, when she attracted the attention of one of the most
+impressive of the number.
+
+The formidable benevolence with which he enquired what he could do
+for her made her almost despair of explaining herself; but she finally
+disentangled from a flurry of wrong beginnings the request to be shown
+to the clock-department.
+
+The gentleman considered her thoughtfully. "May I ask what style of
+clock you are looking for? Would it be for a wedding-present, or--?"
+
+The irony of the allusion filled Ann Eliza's veins with sudden strength.
+"I don't want to buy a clock at all. I want to see the head of the
+department."
+
+"Mr. Loomis?" His stare still weighed her--then he seemed to brush aside
+the problem she presented as beneath his notice. "Oh, certainly. Take
+the elevator to the second floor. Next aisle to the left." He waved her
+down the endless perspective of show-cases.
+
+Ann Eliza followed the line of his lordly gesture, and a swift ascent
+brought her to a great hall full of the buzzing and booming of thousands
+of clocks. Whichever way she looked, clocks stretched away from her in
+glittering interminable vistas: clocks of all sizes and voices, from the
+bell-throated giant of the hallway to the chirping dressing-table toy;
+tall clocks of mahogany and brass with cathedral chimes; clocks
+of bronze, glass, porcelain, of every possible size, voice and
+configuration; and between their serried ranks, along the polished
+floor of the aisles, moved the languid forms of other gentlemanly
+floor-walkers, waiting for their duties to begin.
+
+One of them soon approached, and Ann Eliza repeated her request. He
+received it affably.
+
+"Mr. Loomis? Go right down to the office at the other end." He pointed
+to a kind of box of ground glass and highly polished panelling.
+
+As she thanked him he turned to one of his companions and said something
+in which she caught the name of Mr. Loomis, and which was received with
+an appreciative chuckle. She suspected herself of being the object of
+the pleasantry, and straightened her thin shoulders under her mantle.
+
+The door of the office stood open, and within sat a gray-bearded man at
+a desk. He looked up kindly, and again she asked for Mr. Loomis.
+
+"I'm Mr. Loomis. What can I do for you?"
+
+He was much less portentous than the others, though she guessed him
+to be above them in authority; and encouraged by his tone she seated
+herself on the edge of the chair he waved her to.
+
+"I hope you'll excuse my troubling you, sir. I came to ask if you could
+tell me anything about Mr. Herman Ramy. He was employed here in the
+clock-department two or three years ago."
+
+Mr. Loomis showed no recognition of the name.
+
+"Ramy? When was he discharged?"
+
+"I don't har'ly know. He was very sick, and when he got well his place
+had been filled. He married my sister last October and they went to St.
+Louis, I ain't had any news of them for over two months, and she's my
+only sister, and I'm most crazy worrying about her."
+
+"I see." Mr. Loomis reflected. "In what capacity was Ramy employed
+here?" he asked after a moment.
+
+"He--he told us that he was one of the heads of the clock-department,"
+Ann Eliza stammered, overswept by a sudden doubt.
+
+"That was probably a slight exaggeration. But I can tell you about him
+by referring to our books. The name again?"
+
+"Ramy--Herman Ramy."
+
+There ensued a long silence, broken only by the flutter of leaves as
+Mr. Loomis turned over his ledgers. Presently he looked up, keeping his
+finger between the pages.
+
+"Here it is--Herman Ramy. He was one of our ordinary workmen, and left
+us three years and a half ago last June."
+
+"On account of sickness?" Ann Eliza faltered.
+
+Mr. Loomis appeared to hesitate; then he said: "I see no mention of
+sickness." Ann Eliza felt his compassionate eyes on her again. "Perhaps
+I'd better tell you the truth. He was discharged for drug-taking. A
+capable workman, but we couldn't keep him straight. I'm sorry to have to
+tell you this, but it seems fairer, since you say you're anxious about
+your sister."
+
+The polished sides of the office vanished from Ann Eliza's sight, and
+the cackle of the innumerable clocks came to her like the yell of waves
+in a storm. She tried to speak but could not; tried to get to her feet,
+but the floor was gone.
+
+"I'm very sorry," Mr. Loomis repeated, closing the ledger. "I remember
+the man perfectly now. He used to disappear every now and then, and turn
+up again in a state that made him useless for days."
+
+As she listened, Ann Eliza recalled the day when she had come on Mr.
+Ramy sitting in abject dejection behind his counter. She saw again the
+blurred unrecognizing eyes he had raised to her, the layer of dust
+over everything in the shop, and the green bronze clock in the window
+representing a Newfoundland dog with his paw on a book. She stood up
+slowly.
+
+"Thank you. I'm sorry to have troubled you."
+
+"It was no trouble. You say Ramy married your sister last October?"
+
+"Yes, sir; and they went to St. Louis right afterward. I don't know how
+to find her. I thought maybe somebody here might know about him."
+
+"Well, possibly some of the workmen might. Leave me your name and I'll
+send you word if I get on his track."
+
+He handed her a pencil, and she wrote down her address; then she walked
+away blindly between the clocks.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Mr. Loomis, true to his word, wrote a few days later that he had
+enquired in vain in the work-shop for any news of Ramy; and as she
+folded this letter and laid it between the leaves of her Bible, Ann
+Eliza felt that her last hope was gone. Miss Mellins, of course, had
+long since suggested the mediation of the police, and cited from her
+favourite literature convincing instances of the supernatural ability of
+the Pinkerton detective; but Mr. Hawkins, when called in council, dashed
+this project by remarking that detectives cost something like twenty
+dollars a day; and a vague fear of the law, some half-formed vision of
+Evelina in the clutch of a blue-coated "officer," kept Ann Eliza from
+invoking the aid of the police.
+
+After the arrival of Mr. Loomis's note the weeks followed each other
+uneventfully. Ann Eliza's cough clung to her till late in the spring,
+the reflection in her looking-glass grew more bent and meagre, and her
+forehead sloped back farther toward the twist of hair that was fastened
+above her parting by a comb of black India-rubber.
+
+Toward spring a lady who was expecting a baby took up her abode at the
+Mendoza Family Hotel, and through the friendly intervention of Miss
+Mellins the making of some of the baby-clothes was entrusted to Ann
+Eliza. This eased her of anxiety for the immediate future; but she had
+to rouse herself to feel any sense of relief. Her personal welfare was
+what least concerned her. Sometimes she thought of giving up the shop
+altogether; and only the fear that, if she changed her address, Evelina
+might not be able to find her, kept her from carrying out this plan.
+
+Since she had lost her last hope of tracing her sister, all the
+activities of her lonely imagination had been concentrated on the
+possibility of Evelina's coming back to her. The discovery of Ramy's
+secret filled her with dreadful fears. In the solitude of the shop
+and the back room she was tortured by vague pictures of Evelina's
+sufferings. What horrors might not be hidden beneath her silence? Ann
+Eliza's great dread was that Miss Mellins should worm out of her what
+she had learned from Mr. Loomis. She was sure Miss Mellins must have
+abominable things to tell about drug-fiends--things she did not have
+the strength to hear. "Drug-fiend"--the very word was Satanic; she
+could hear Miss Mellins roll it on her tongue. But Ann Eliza's own
+imagination, left to itself, had begun to people the long hours with
+evil visions. Sometimes, in the night, she thought she heard herself
+called: the voice was her sister's, but faint with a nameless terror.
+Her most peaceful moments were those in which she managed to convince
+herself that Evelina was dead. She thought of her then, mournfully but
+more calmly, as thrust away under the neglected mound of some unknown
+cemetery, where no headstone marked her name, no mourner with flowers
+for another grave paused in pity to lay a blossom on hers. But this
+vision did not often give Ann Eliza its negative relief; and always,
+beneath its hazy lines, lurked the dark conviction that Evelina was
+alive, in misery and longing for her.
+
+So the summer wore on. Ann Eliza was conscious that Mrs. Hawkins and
+Miss Mellins were watching her with affectionate anxiety, but the
+knowledge brought no comfort. She no longer cared what they felt or
+thought about her. Her grief lay far beyond touch of human healing, and
+after a while she became aware that they knew they could not help her.
+They still came in as often as their busy lives permitted, but their
+visits grew shorter, and Mrs. Hawkins always brought Arthur or the baby,
+so that there should be something to talk about, and some one whom she
+could scold.
+
+The autumn came, and the winter. Business had fallen off again, and but
+few purchasers came to the little shop in the basement. In January Ann
+Eliza pawned her mother's cashmere scarf, her mosaic brooch, and the
+rosewood what-not on which the clock had always stood; she would
+have sold the bedstead too, but for the persistent vision of Evelina
+returning weak and weary, and not knowing where to lay her head.
+
+The winter passed in its turn, and March reappeared with its galaxies of
+yellow jonquils at the windy street corners, reminding Ann Eliza of the
+spring day when Evelina had come home with a bunch of jonquils in her
+hand. In spite of the flowers which lent such a premature brightness to
+the streets the month was fierce and stormy, and Ann Eliza could get
+no warmth into her bones. Nevertheless, she was insensibly beginning to
+take up the healing routine of life. Little by little she had grown used
+to being alone, she had begun to take a languid interest in the one or
+two new purchasers the season had brought, and though the thought
+of Evelina was as poignant as ever, it was less persistently in the
+foreground of her mind.
+
+Late one afternoon she was sitting behind the counter, wrapped in her
+shawl, and wondering how soon she might draw down the blinds and retreat
+into the comparative cosiness of the back room. She was not thinking of
+anything in particular, except perhaps in a hazy way of the lady with
+the puffed sleeves, who after her long eclipse had reappeared the day
+before in sleeves of a new cut, and bought some tape and needles. The
+lady still wore mourning, but she was evidently lightening it, and Ann
+Eliza saw in this the hope of future orders. The lady had left the shop
+about an hour before, walking away with her graceful step toward Fifth
+Avenue. She had wished Ann Eliza good day in her usual affable way, and
+Ann Eliza thought how odd it was that they should have been acquainted
+so long, and yet that she should not know the lady's name. From this
+consideration her mind wandered to the cut of the lady's new sleeves,
+and she was vexed with herself for not having noted it more carefully.
+She felt Miss Mellins might have liked to know about it. Ann Eliza's
+powers of observation had never been as keen as Evelina's, when the
+latter was not too self-absorbed to exert them. As Miss Mellins always
+said, Evelina could "take patterns with her eyes": she could have cut
+that new sleeve out of a folded newspaper in a trice! Musing on these
+things, Ann Eliza wished the lady would come back and give her another
+look at the sleeve. It was not unlikely that she might pass that way,
+for she certainly lived in or about the Square. Suddenly Ann Eliza
+remarked a small neat handkerchief on the counter: it must have dropped
+from the lady's purse, and she would probably come back to get it. Ann
+Eliza, pleased at the idea, sat on behind the counter and watched the
+darkening street. She always lit the gas as late as possible, keeping
+the box of matches at her elbow, so that if any one came she could apply
+a quick flame to the gas-jet. At length through the deepening dusk she
+distinguished a slim dark figure coming down the steps to the shop. With
+a little warmth of pleasure about her heart she reached up to light the
+gas. "I do believe I'll ask her name this time," she thought. She raised
+the flame to its full height, and saw her sister standing in the door.
+
+There she was at last, the poor pale shade of Evelina, her thin face
+blanched of its faint pink, the stiff ripples gone from her hair, and a
+mantle shabbier than Ann Eliza's drawn about her narrow shoulders. The
+glare of the gas beat full on her as she stood and looked at Ann Eliza.
+
+"Sister--oh, Evelina! I knowed you'd come!"
+
+Ann Eliza had caught her close with a long moan of triumph. Vague
+words poured from her as she laid her cheek against Evelina's--trivial
+inarticulate endearments caught from Mrs. Hawkins's long discourses to
+her baby.
+
+For a while Evelina let herself be passively held; then she drew back
+from her sister's clasp and looked about the shop. "I'm dead tired.
+Ain't there any fire?" she asked.
+
+"Of course there is!" Ann Eliza, holding her hand fast, drew her into
+the back room. She did not want to ask any questions yet: she simply
+wanted to feel the emptiness of the room brimmed full again by the one
+presence that was warmth and light to her.
+
+She knelt down before the grate, scraped some bits of coal and kindling
+from the bottom of the coal-scuttle, and drew one of the rocking-chairs
+up to the weak flame. "There--that'll blaze up in a minute," she said.
+She pressed Evelina down on the faded cushions of the rocking-chair,
+and, kneeling beside her, began to rub her hands.
+
+"You're stone-cold, ain't you? Just sit still and warm yourself while I
+run and get the kettle. I've got something you always used to fancy for
+supper." She laid her hand on Evelina's shoulder. "Don't talk--oh, don't
+talk yet!" she implored. She wanted to keep that one frail second of
+happiness between herself and what she knew must come.
+
+Evelina, without a word, bent over the fire, stretching her thin hands
+to the blaze and watching Ann Eliza fill the kettle and set the supper
+table. Her gaze had the dreamy fixity of a half-awakened child's.
+
+Ann Eliza, with a smile of triumph, brought a slice of custard pie from
+the cupboard and put it by her sister's plate.
+
+"You do like that, don't you? Miss Mellins sent it down to me this
+morning. She had her aunt from Brooklyn to dinner. Ain't it funny it
+just so happened?"
+
+"I ain't hungry," said Evelina, rising to approach the table.
+
+She sat down in her usual place, looked about her with the same
+wondering stare, and then, as of old, poured herself out the first cup
+of tea.
+
+"Where's the what-not gone to?" she suddenly asked.
+
+Ann Eliza set down the teapot and rose to get a spoon from the cupboard.
+With her back to the room she said: "The what-not? Why, you see, dearie,
+living here all alone by myself it only made one more thing to dust; so
+I sold it."
+
+Evelina's eyes were still travelling about the familiar room. Though
+it was against all the traditions of the Bunner family to sell any
+household possession, she showed no surprise at her sister's answer.
+
+"And the clock? The clock's gone too."
+
+"Oh, I gave that away--I gave it to Mrs. Hawkins. She's kep' awake so
+nights with that last baby."
+
+"I wish you'd never bought it," said Evelina harshly.
+
+Ann Eliza's heart grew faint with fear. Without answering, she crossed
+over to her sister's seat and poured her out a second cup of tea. Then
+another thought struck her, and she went back to the cupboard and took
+out the cordial. In Evelina's absence considerable draughts had been
+drawn from it by invalid neighbours; but a glassful of the precious
+liquid still remained.
+
+"Here, drink this right off--it'll warm you up quicker than anything,"
+Ann Eliza said.
+
+Evelina obeyed, and a slight spark of colour came into her cheeks.
+She turned to the custard pie and began to eat with a silent voracity
+distressing to watch. She did not even look to see what was left for Ann
+Eliza.
+
+"I ain't hungry," she said at last as she laid down her fork. "I'm only
+so dead tired--that's the trouble."
+
+"Then you'd better get right into bed. Here's my old plaid
+dressing-gown--you remember it, don't you?" Ann Eliza laughed, recalling
+Evelina's ironies on the subject of the antiquated garment. With
+trembling fingers she began to undo her sister's cloak. The dress
+beneath it told a tale of poverty that Ann Eliza dared not pause to
+note. She drew it gently off, and as it slipped from Evelina's shoulders
+it revealed a tiny black bag hanging on a ribbon about her neck. Evelina
+lifted her hand as though to screen the bag from Ann Eliza; and the
+elder sister, seeing the gesture, continued her task with lowered eyes.
+She undressed Evelina as quickly as she could, and wrapping her in the
+plaid dressing-gown put her to bed, and spread her own shawl and her
+sister's cloak above the blanket.
+
+"Where's the old red comfortable?" Evelina asked, as she sank down on
+the pillow.
+
+"The comfortable? Oh, it was so hot and heavy I never used it after you
+went--so I sold that too. I never could sleep under much clothes."
+
+She became aware that her sister was looking at her more attentively.
+
+"I guess you've been in trouble too," Evelina said.
+
+"Me? In trouble? What do you mean, Evelina?"
+
+"You've had to pawn the things, I suppose," Evelina continued in a weary
+unmoved tone. "Well, I've been through worse than that. I've been to
+hell and back."
+
+"Oh, Evelina--don't say it, sister!" Ann Eliza implored, shrinking
+from the unholy word. She knelt down and began to rub her sister's feet
+beneath the bedclothes.
+
+"I've been to hell and back--if I AM back," Evelina repeated. She
+lifted her head from the pillow and began to talk with a sudden feverish
+volubility. "It began right away, less than a month after we were
+married. I've been in hell all that time, Ann Eliza." She fixed her eyes
+with passionate intentness on Ann Eliza's face. "He took opium. I didn't
+find it out till long afterward--at first, when he acted so strange, I
+thought he drank. But it was worse, much worse than drinking."
+
+"Oh, sister, don't say it--don't say it yet! It's so sweet just to have
+you here with me again."
+
+"I must say it," Evelina insisted, her flushed face burning with a kind
+of bitter cruelty. "You don't know what life's like--you don't know
+anything about it--setting here safe all the while in this peaceful
+place."
+
+"Oh, Evelina--why didn't you write and send for me if it was like that?"
+
+"That's why I couldn't write. Didn't you guess I was ashamed?"
+
+"How could you be? Ashamed to write to Ann Eliza?"
+
+Evelina raised herself on her thin elbow, while Ann Eliza, bending over,
+drew a corner of the shawl about her shoulder.
+
+"Do lay down again. You'll catch your death."
+
+"My death? That don't frighten me! You don't know what I've been
+through." And sitting upright in the old mahogany bed, with flushed
+cheeks and chattering teeth, and Ann Eliza's trembling arm clasping the
+shawl about her neck, Evelina poured out her story. It was a tale
+of misery and humiliation so remote from the elder sister's innocent
+experiences that much of it was hardly intelligible to her. Evelina's
+dreadful familiarity with it all, her fluency about things which Ann
+Eliza half-guessed and quickly shuddered back from, seemed even more
+alien and terrible than the actual tale she told. It was one thing--and
+heaven knew it was bad enough!--to learn that one's sister's husband was
+a drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from that
+sister's pallid lips what vileness lay behind the word.
+
+Evelina, unconscious of any distress but her own, sat upright, shivering
+in Ann Eliza's hold, while she piled up, detail by detail, her dreary
+narrative.
+
+"The minute we got out there, and he found the job wasn't as good as he
+expected, he changed. At first I thought he was sick--I used to try to
+keep him home and nurse him. Then I saw it was something different.
+He used to go off for hours at a time, and when he came back his eyes
+kinder had a fog over them. Sometimes he didn't har'ly know me, and
+when he did he seemed to hate me. Once he hit me here." She touched her
+breast. "Do you remember, Ann Eliza, that time he didn't come to see us
+for a week--the time after we all went to Central Park together--and you
+and I thought he must be sick?"
+
+Ann Eliza nodded.
+
+"Well, that was the trouble--he'd been at it then. But nothing like as
+bad. After we'd been out there about a month he disappeared for a whole
+week. They took him back at the store, and gave him another chance; but
+the second time they discharged him, and he drifted round for ever so
+long before he could get another job. We spent all our money and had to
+move to a cheaper place. Then he got something to do, but they hardly
+paid him anything, and he didn't stay there long. When he found out
+about the baby--"
+
+"The baby?" Ann Eliza faltered.
+
+"It's dead--it only lived a day. When he found out about it, he got mad,
+and said he hadn't any money to pay doctors' bills, and I'd better
+write to you to help us. He had an idea you had money hidden away that
+I didn't know about." She turned to her sister with remorseful eyes. "It
+was him that made me get that hundred dollars out of you."
+
+"Hush, hush. I always meant it for you anyhow."
+
+"Yes, but I wouldn't have taken it if he hadn't been at me the whole
+time. He used to make me do just what he wanted. Well, when I said I
+wouldn't write to you for more money he said I'd better try and earn
+some myself. That was when he struck me.... Oh, you don't know what I'm
+talking about yet!... I tried to get work at a milliner's, but I was so
+sick I couldn't stay. I was sick all the time. I wisht I'd ha' died, Ann
+Eliza."
+
+"No, no, Evelina."
+
+"Yes, I do. It kept getting worse and worse. We pawned the furniture,
+and they turned us out because we couldn't pay the rent; and so then we
+went to board with Mrs. Hochmuller."
+
+Ann Eliza pressed her closer to dissemble her own tremor. "Mrs.
+Hochmuller?"
+
+"Didn't you know she was out there? She moved out a month after we did.
+She wasn't bad to me, and I think she tried to keep him straight--but
+Linda--"
+
+"Linda--?"
+
+"Well, when I kep' getting worse, and he was always off, for days at a
+time, the doctor had me sent to a hospital."
+
+"A hospital? Sister--sister!"
+
+"It was better than being with him; and the doctors were real kind to
+me. After the baby was born I was very sick and had to stay there a good
+while. And one day when I was laying there Mrs. Hochmuller came in as
+white as a sheet, and told me him and Linda had gone off together and
+taken all her money. That's the last I ever saw of him." She broke off
+with a laugh and began to cough again.
+
+Ann Eliza tried to persuade her to lie down and sleep, but the rest of
+her story had to be told before she could be soothed into consent. After
+the news of Ramy's flight she had had brain fever, and had been sent
+to another hospital where she stayed a long time--how long she couldn't
+remember. Dates and days meant nothing to her in the shapeless ruin of
+her life. When she left the hospital she found that Mrs. Hochmuller had
+gone too. She was penniless, and had no one to turn to. A lady visitor
+at the hospital was kind, and found her a place where she did housework;
+but she was so weak they couldn't keep her. Then she got a job as
+waitress in a down-town lunch-room, but one day she fainted while she
+was handing a dish, and that evening when they paid her they told her
+she needn't come again.
+
+"After that I begged in the streets"--(Ann Eliza's grasp again grew
+tight)--"and one afternoon last week, when the matinees was coming out,
+I met a man with a pleasant face, something like Mr. Hawkins, and he
+stopped and asked me what the trouble was. I told him if he'd give me
+five dollars I'd have money enough to buy a ticket back to New York, and
+he took a good look at me and said, well, if that was what I wanted he'd
+go straight to the station with me and give me the five dollars there.
+So he did--and he bought the ticket, and put me in the cars."
+
+Evelina sank back, her face a sallow wedge in the white cleft of the
+pillow. Ann Eliza leaned over her, and for a long time they held each
+other without speaking.
+
+They were still clasped in this dumb embrace when there was a step in
+the shop and Ann Eliza, starting up, saw Miss Mellins in the doorway.
+
+"My sakes, Miss Bunner! What in the land are you doing? Miss
+Evelina--Mrs. Ramy--it ain't you?"
+
+Miss Mellins's eyes, bursting from their sockets, sprang from Evelina's
+pallid face to the disordered supper table and the heap of worn clothes
+on the floor; then they turned back to Ann Eliza, who had placed herself
+on the defensive between her sister and the dress-maker.
+
+"My sister Evelina has come back--come back on a visit. She was taken
+sick in the cars on the way home--I guess she caught cold--so I made her
+go right to bed as soon as ever she got here."
+
+Ann Eliza was surprised at the strength and steadiness of her voice.
+Fortified by its sound she went on, her eyes on Miss Mellins's baffled
+countenance: "Mr. Ramy has gone west on a trip--a trip connected with
+his business; and Evelina is going to stay with me till he comes back."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+What measure of belief her explanation of Evelina's return obtained
+in the small circle of her friends Ann Eliza did not pause to enquire.
+Though she could not remember ever having told a lie before, she adhered
+with rigid tenacity to the consequences of her first lapse from truth,
+and fortified her original statement with additional details whenever a
+questioner sought to take her unawares.
+
+But other and more serious burdens lay on her startled conscience. For
+the first time in her life she dimly faced the awful problem of
+the inutility of self-sacrifice. Hitherto she had never thought
+of questioning the inherited principles which had guided her life.
+Self-effacement for the good of others had always seemed to her both
+natural and necessary; but then she had taken it for granted that it
+implied the securing of that good. Now she perceived that to refuse the
+gifts of life does not ensure their transmission to those for whom they
+have been surrendered; and her familiar heaven was unpeopled. She felt
+she could no longer trust in the goodness of God, and there was only a
+black abyss above the roof of Bunner Sisters.
+
+But there was little time to brood upon such problems. The care of
+Evelina filled Ann Eliza's days and nights. The hastily summoned doctor
+had pronounced her to be suffering from pneumonia, and under his care
+the first stress of the disease was relieved. But her recovery was only
+partial, and long after the doctor's visits had ceased she continued to
+lie in bed, too weak to move, and seemingly indifferent to everything
+about her.
+
+At length one evening, about six weeks after her return, she said to her
+sister: "I don't feel's if I'd ever get up again."
+
+Ann Eliza turned from the kettle she was placing on the stove. She was
+startled by the echo the words woke in her own breast.
+
+"Don't you talk like that, Evelina! I guess you're on'y tired out--and
+disheartened."
+
+"Yes, I'm disheartened," Evelina murmured.
+
+A few months earlier Ann Eliza would have met the confession with a word
+of pious admonition; now she accepted it in silence.
+
+"Maybe you'll brighten up when your cough gets better," she suggested.
+
+"Yes--or my cough'll get better when I brighten up," Evelina retorted
+with a touch of her old tartness.
+
+"Does your cough keep on hurting you jest as much?"
+
+"I don't see's there's much difference."
+
+"Well, I guess I'll get the doctor to come round again," Ann Eliza said,
+trying for the matter-of-course tone in which one might speak of sending
+for the plumber or the gas-fitter.
+
+"It ain't any use sending for the doctor--and who's going to pay him?"
+
+"I am," answered the elder sister. "Here's your tea, and a mite of
+toast. Don't that tempt you?"
+
+Already, in the watches of the night, Ann Eliza had been tormented by
+that same question--who was to pay the doctor?--and a few days before
+she had temporarily silenced it by borrowing twenty dollars of Miss
+Mellins. The transaction had cost her one of the bitterest struggles
+of her life. She had never borrowed a penny of any one before, and the
+possibility of having to do so had always been classed in her mind
+among those shameful extremities to which Providence does not let
+decent people come. But nowadays she no longer believed in the personal
+supervision of Providence; and had she been compelled to steal the money
+instead of borrowing it, she would have felt that her conscience was the
+only tribunal before which she had to answer. Nevertheless, the actual
+humiliation of having to ask for the money was no less bitter; and she
+could hardly hope that Miss Mellins would view the case with the
+same detachment as herself. Miss Mellins was very kind; but she not
+unnaturally felt that her kindness should be rewarded by according
+her the right to ask questions; and bit by bit Ann Eliza saw Evelina's
+miserable secret slipping into the dress-maker's possession.
+
+When the doctor came she left him alone with Evelina, busying herself in
+the shop that she might have an opportunity of seeing him alone on his
+way out. To steady herself she began to sort a trayful of buttons, and
+when the doctor appeared she was reciting under her breath: "Twenty-four
+horn, two and a half cards fancy pearl..." She saw at once that his look
+was grave.
+
+He sat down on the chair beside the counter, and her mind travelled
+miles before he spoke.
+
+"Miss Bunner, the best thing you can do is to let me get a bed for your
+sister at St. Luke's."
+
+"The hospital?"
+
+"Come now, you're above that sort of prejudice, aren't you?" The doctor
+spoke in the tone of one who coaxes a spoiled child. "I know how devoted
+you are--but Mrs. Ramy can be much better cared for there than here.
+You really haven't time to look after her and attend to your business as
+well. There'll be no expense, you understand--"
+
+Ann Eliza made no answer. "You think my sister's going to be sick a good
+while, then?" she asked.
+
+"Well, yes--possibly."
+
+"You think she's very sick?"
+
+"Well, yes. She's very sick."
+
+His face had grown still graver; he sat there as though he had never
+known what it was to hurry.
+
+Ann Eliza continued to separate the pearl and horn buttons. Suddenly she
+lifted her eyes and looked at him. "Is she going to die?"
+
+The doctor laid a kindly hand on hers. "We never say that, Miss Bunner.
+Human skill works wonders--and at the hospital Mrs. Ramy would have
+every chance."
+
+"What is it? What's she dying of?"
+
+The doctor hesitated, seeking to substitute a popular phrase for the
+scientific terminology which rose to his lips.
+
+"I want to know," Ann Eliza persisted.
+
+"Yes, of course; I understand. Well, your sister has had a hard
+time lately, and there is a complication of causes, resulting in
+consumption--rapid consumption. At the hospital--"
+
+"I'll keep her here," said Ann Eliza quietly.
+
+After the doctor had gone she went on for some time sorting the buttons;
+then she slipped the tray into its place on a shelf behind the counter
+and went into the back room. She found Evelina propped upright against
+the pillows, a flush of agitation on her cheeks. Ann Eliza pulled up the
+shawl which had slipped from her sister's shoulders.
+
+"How long you've been! What's he been saying?"
+
+"Oh, he went long ago--he on'y stopped to give me a prescription. I was
+sorting out that tray of buttons. Miss Mellins's girl got them all mixed
+up."
+
+She felt Evelina's eyes upon her.
+
+"He must have said something: what was it?"
+
+"Why, he said you'd have to be careful--and stay in bed--and take this
+new medicine he's given you."
+
+"Did he say I was going to get well?"
+
+"Why, Evelina!"
+
+"What's the use, Ann Eliza? You can't deceive me. I've just been up to
+look at myself in the glass; and I saw plenty of 'em in the hospital
+that looked like me. They didn't get well, and I ain't going to." Her
+head dropped back. "It don't much matter--I'm about tired. On'y there's
+one thing--Ann Eliza--"
+
+The elder sister drew near to the bed.
+
+"There's one thing I ain't told you. I didn't want to tell you yet
+because I was afraid you might be sorry--but if he says I'm going to
+die I've got to say it." She stopped to cough, and to Ann Eliza it now
+seemed as though every cough struck a minute from the hours remaining to
+her.
+
+"Don't talk now--you're tired."
+
+"I'll be tireder to-morrow, I guess. And I want you should know. Sit
+down close to me--there."
+
+Ann Eliza sat down in silence, stroking her shrunken hand.
+
+"I'm a Roman Catholic, Ann Eliza."
+
+"Evelina--oh, Evelina Bunner! A Roman Catholic--YOU? Oh, Evelina, did HE
+make you?"
+
+Evelina shook her head. "I guess he didn't have no religion; he never
+spoke of it. But you see Mrs. Hochmuller was a Catholic, and so when I
+was sick she got the doctor to send me to a Roman Catholic hospital,
+and the sisters was so good to me there--and the priest used to come and
+talk to me; and the things he said kep' me from going crazy. He seemed
+to make everything easier."
+
+"Oh, sister, how could you?" Ann Eliza wailed. She knew little of the
+Catholic religion except that "Papists" believed in it--in itself a
+sufficient indictment. Her spiritual rebellion had not freed her from
+the formal part of her religious belief, and apostasy had always seemed
+to her one of the sins from which the pure in mind avert their thoughts.
+
+"And then when the baby was born," Evelina continued, "he christened it
+right away, so it could go to heaven; and after that, you see, I had to
+be a Catholic."
+
+"I don't see--"
+
+"Don't I have to be where the baby is? I couldn't ever ha' gone there if
+I hadn't been made a Catholic. Don't you understand that?"
+
+Ann Eliza sat speechless, drawing her hand away. Once more she
+found herself shut out of Evelina's heart, an exile from her closest
+affections.
+
+"I've got to go where the baby is," Evelina feverishly insisted.
+
+Ann Eliza could think of nothing to say; she could only feel that
+Evelina was dying, and dying as a stranger in her arms. Ramy and the
+day-old baby had parted her forever from her sister.
+
+Evelina began again. "If I get worse I want you to send for a priest.
+Miss Mellins'll know where to send--she's got an aunt that's a Catholic.
+Promise me faithful you will."
+
+"I promise," said Ann Eliza.
+
+After that they spoke no more of the matter; but Ann Eliza now
+understood that the little black bag about her sister's neck, which
+she had innocently taken for a memento of Ramy, was some kind of
+sacrilegious amulet, and her fingers shrank from its contact when she
+bathed and dressed Evelina. It seemed to her the diabolical instrument
+of their estrangement.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Spring had really come at last. There were leaves on the ailanthus-tree
+that Evelina could see from her bed, gentle clouds floated over it in
+the blue, and now and then the cry of a flower-seller sounded from the
+street.
+
+One day there was a shy knock on the back-room door, and Johnny Hawkins
+came in with two yellow jonquils in his fist. He was getting bigger and
+squarer, and his round freckled face was growing into a smaller copy of
+his father's. He walked up to Evelina and held out the flowers.
+
+"They blew off the cart and the fellow said I could keep 'em. But you
+can have 'em," he announced.
+
+Ann Eliza rose from her seat at the sewing-machine and tried to take the
+flowers from him.
+
+"They ain't for you; they're for her," he sturdily objected; and Evelina
+held out her hand for the jonquils.
+
+After Johnny had gone she lay and looked at them without speaking. Ann
+Eliza, who had gone back to the machine, bent her head over the seam she
+was stitching; the click, click, click of the machine sounded in her ear
+like the tick of Ramy's clock, and it seemed to her that life had gone
+backward, and that Evelina, radiant and foolish, had just come into the
+room with the yellow flowers in her hand.
+
+When at last she ventured to look up, she saw that her sister's head
+had drooped against the pillow, and that she was sleeping quietly. Her
+relaxed hand still held the jonquils, but it was evident that they had
+awakened no memories; she had dozed off almost as soon as Johnny had
+given them to her. The discovery gave Ann Eliza a startled sense of the
+ruins that must be piled upon her past. "I don't believe I could have
+forgotten that day, though," she said to herself. But she was glad that
+Evelina had forgotten.
+
+Evelina's disease moved on along the usual course, now lifting her on a
+brief wave of elation, now sinking her to new depths of weakness.
+There was little to be done, and the doctor came only at lengthening
+intervals. On his way out he always repeated his first friendly
+suggestion about sending Evelina to the hospital; and Ann Eliza always
+answered: "I guess we can manage."
+
+The hours passed for her with the fierce rapidity that great joy or
+anguish lends them. She went through the days with a sternly smiling
+precision, but she hardly knew what was happening, and when night-fall
+released her from the shop, and she could carry her work to Evelina's
+bedside, the same sense of unreality accompanied her, and she still
+seemed to be accomplishing a task whose object had escaped her memory.
+
+Once, when Evelina felt better, she expressed a desire to make some
+artificial flowers, and Ann Eliza, deluded by this awakening interest,
+got out the faded bundles of stems and petals and the little tools and
+spools of wire. But after a few minutes the work dropped from Evelina's
+hands and she said: "I'll wait until to-morrow."
+
+She never again spoke of the flower-making, but one day, after watching
+Ann Eliza's laboured attempt to trim a spring hat for Mrs. Hawkins, she
+demanded impatiently that the hat should be brought to her, and in a
+trice had galvanized the lifeless bow and given the brim the twist it
+needed.
+
+These were rare gleams; and more frequent were the days of speechless
+lassitude, when she lay for hours silently staring at the window, shaken
+only by the hard incessant cough that sounded to Ann Eliza like the
+hammering of nails into a coffin.
+
+At length one morning Ann Eliza, starting up from the mattress at the
+foot of the bed, hastily called Miss Mellins down, and ran through the
+smoky dawn for the doctor. He came back with her and did what he could
+to give Evelina momentary relief; then he went away, promising to
+look in again before night. Miss Mellins, her head still covered with
+curl-papers, disappeared in his wake, and when the sisters were alone
+Evelina beckoned to Ann Eliza.
+
+"You promised," she whispered, grasping her sister's arm; and Ann Eliza
+understood. She had not yet dared to tell Miss Mellins of Evelina's
+change of faith; it had seemed even more difficult than borrowing the
+money; but now it had to be done. She ran upstairs after the dress-maker
+and detained her on the landing.
+
+"Miss Mellins, can you tell me where to send for a priest--a Roman
+Catholic priest?"
+
+"A priest, Miss Bunner?"
+
+"Yes. My sister became a Roman Catholic while she was away. They were
+kind to her in her sickness--and now she wants a priest." Ann Eliza
+faced Miss Mellins with unflinching eyes.
+
+"My aunt Dugan'll know. I'll run right round to her the minute I get my
+papers off," the dress-maker promised; and Ann Eliza thanked her.
+
+An hour or two later the priest appeared. Ann Eliza, who was watching,
+saw him coming down the steps to the shop-door and went to meet him. His
+expression was kind, but she shrank from his peculiar dress, and from
+his pale face with its bluish chin and enigmatic smile. Ann Eliza
+remained in the shop. Miss Mellins's girl had mixed the buttons again
+and she set herself to sort them. The priest stayed a long time with
+Evelina. When he again carried his enigmatic smile past the counter, and
+Ann Eliza rejoined her sister, Evelina was smiling with something of the
+same mystery; but she did not tell her secret.
+
+After that it seemed to Ann Eliza that the shop and the back room no
+longer belonged to her. It was as though she were there on sufferance,
+indulgently tolerated by the unseen power which hovered over Evelina
+even in the absence of its minister. The priest came almost daily; and
+at last a day arrived when he was called to administer some rite of
+which Ann Eliza but dimly grasped the sacramental meaning. All she knew
+was that it meant that Evelina was going, and going, under this alien
+guidance, even farther from her than to the dark places of death.
+
+When the priest came, with something covered in his hands, she crept
+into the shop, closing the door of the back room to leave him alone with
+Evelina.
+
+It was a warm afternoon in May, and the crooked ailanthus-tree rooted in
+a fissure of the opposite pavement was a fountain of tender green. Women
+in light dresses passed with the languid step of spring; and presently
+there came a man with a hand-cart full of pansy and geranium plants who
+stopped outside the window, signalling to Ann Eliza to buy.
+
+An hour went by before the door of the back room opened and the priest
+reappeared with that mysterious covered something in his hands. Ann
+Eliza had risen, drawing back as he passed. He had doubtless divined her
+antipathy, for he had hitherto only bowed in going in and out; but to
+day he paused and looked at her compassionately.
+
+"I have left your sister in a very beautiful state of mind," he said in
+a low voice like a woman's. "She is full of spiritual consolation."
+
+Ann Eliza was silent, and he bowed and went out. She hastened back to
+Evelina's bed, and knelt down beside it. Evelina's eyes were very
+large and bright; she turned them on Ann Eliza with a look of inner
+illumination.
+
+"I shall see the baby," she said; then her eyelids fell and she dozed.
+
+The doctor came again at nightfall, administering some last palliatives;
+and after he had gone Ann Eliza, refusing to have her vigil shared by
+Miss Mellins or Mrs. Hawkins, sat down to keep watch alone.
+
+It was a very quiet night. Evelina never spoke or opened her eyes,
+but in the still hour before dawn Ann Eliza saw that the restless hand
+outside the bed-clothes had stopped its twitching. She stooped over and
+felt no breath on her sister's lips.
+
+
+The funeral took place three days later. Evelina was buried in
+Calvary Cemetery, the priest assuming the whole care of the necessary
+arrangements, while Ann Eliza, a passive spectator, beheld with stony
+indifference this last negation of her past.
+
+A week afterward she stood in her bonnet and mantle in the doorway of
+the little shop. Its whole aspect had changed. Counter and shelves were
+bare, the window was stripped of its familiar miscellany of artificial
+flowers, note-paper, wire hat-frames, and limp garments from the dyer's;
+and against the glass pane of the doorway hung a sign: "This store to
+let."
+
+Ann Eliza turned her eyes from the sign as she went out and locked the
+door behind her. Evelina's funeral had been very expensive, and Ann
+Eliza, having sold her stock-in-trade and the few articles of furniture
+that remained to her, was leaving the shop for the last time. She had
+not been able to buy any mourning, but Miss Mellins had sewed some crape
+on her old black mantle and bonnet, and having no gloves she slipped her
+bare hands under the folds of the mantle.
+
+It was a beautiful morning, and the air was full of a warm sunshine that
+had coaxed open nearly every window in the street, and summoned to the
+window-sills the sickly plants nurtured indoors in winter. Ann Eliza's
+way lay westward, toward Broadway; but at the corner she paused and
+looked back down the familiar length of the street. Her eyes rested a
+moment on the blotched "Bunner Sisters" above the empty window of the
+shop; then they travelled on to the overflowing foliage of the Square,
+above which was the church tower with the dial that had marked the hours
+for the sisters before Ann Eliza had bought the nickel clock. She looked
+at it all as though it had been the scene of some unknown life, of which
+the vague report had reached her: she felt for herself the only remote
+pity that busy people accord to the misfortunes which come to them by
+hearsay.
+
+She walked to Broadway and down to the office of the house-agent to whom
+she had entrusted the sub-letting of the shop. She left the key with
+one of his clerks, who took it from her as if it had been any one of a
+thousand others, and remarked that the weather looked as if spring
+was really coming; then she turned and began to move up the great
+thoroughfare, which was just beginning to wake to its multitudinous
+activities.
+
+She walked less rapidly now, studying each shop window as she passed,
+but not with the desultory eye of enjoyment: the watchful fixity of her
+gaze overlooked everything but the object of its quest. At length she
+stopped before a small window wedged between two mammoth buildings,
+and displaying, behind its shining plate-glass festooned with muslin,
+a varied assortment of sofa-cushions, tea-cloths, pen-wipers, painted
+calendars and other specimens of feminine industry. In a corner of
+the window she had read, on a slip of paper pasted against the pane:
+"Wanted, a Saleslady," and after studying the display of fancy articles
+beneath it, she gave her mantle a twitch, straightened her shoulders and
+went in.
+
+Behind a counter crowded with pin-cushions, watch-holders and other
+needlework trifles, a plump young woman with smooth hair sat sewing bows
+of ribbon on a scrap basket. The little shop was about the size of the
+one on which Ann Eliza had just closed the door; and it looked as fresh
+and gay and thriving as she and Evelina had once dreamed of making
+Bunner Sisters. The friendly air of the place made her pluck up courage
+to speak.
+
+"Saleslady? Yes, we do want one. Have you any one to recommend?" the
+young woman asked, not unkindly.
+
+Ann Eliza hesitated, disconcerted by the unexpected question; and the
+other, cocking her head on one side to study the effect of the bow she
+had just sewed on the basket, continued: "We can't afford more than
+thirty dollars a month, but the work is light. She would be expected to
+do a little fancy sewing between times. We want a bright girl: stylish,
+and pleasant manners. You know what I mean. Not over thirty, anyhow; and
+nice-looking. Will you write down the name?"
+
+Ann Eliza looked at her confusedly. She opened her lips to explain, and
+then, without speaking, turned toward the crisply-curtained door.
+
+"Ain't you going to leave the AD-dress?" the young woman called out
+after her. Ann Eliza went out into the thronged street. The great city,
+under the fair spring sky, seemed to throb with the stir of innumerable
+beginnings. She walked on, looking for another shop window with a sign
+in it.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUNNER SISTERS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 311.txt or 311.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/1/311/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.