"Had a pleasant summer, Flora?" asked Catherine, as she opened Marian's bag.
"Land, yes, Mis' Hammond." Flora whisked her cloth. "I'm gonna get married to a puhfessional man. He's been showing me tenshions all summer. He ain't committed hisself till last week."
"You are!" Catherine looked at her in dismay. "When?"
"Oh, I ain't gonna give up my work, Mis' Hammond. Not till I sees how he pans out. I tried that once, and my las' husband, he couldn't maintain me as I was accustomed to be. So I says to my intended, I'll get married to you for pleasure, but I keeps my job. He don't care."
Catherine laughed. She knew that Flora had made earlier experiments in marriage, once to the extent of going back to Porto Rico. But she had, through all her changes of name, kept her good humor, her cleverness, and her apparent devotion to Catherine.
She rose swiftly from her knees, her long string of green beads clinking against her pail of water.
"I believes in keeping men in his place," she said, with an expanding grin. "If you don't, they keeps you in yours."
Catherine, adding the pile of Marian's dirty clothes to the jammed laundry bag, laughed again.
"I suppose so," she said. "What am I going to do with all this laundry! You'd think we hadn't washed all summer, the way things pile up."
"I'll take that right home to-night, Mis' Hammond. My sister can do it for you. My gentleman friend is stopping by for me in his car."
Catherine smoothed the cretonne scarf on the dressing table, adjusted the bright curtains, moved the little wicker chair to make room for Letty's bed, and with a grimace at the glimpse of the court even through the curtains, went on to the living room. Letty was asleep in Catherine's room. Spencer and Marian had scorned her hint that a nap might be good for them, and were sitting disconsolately in chairs drawn near the windows. Here, at least, was something beside too intimate suggestion of neighboring lives, even if the rain held it to-day in somber dullness. Beneath the windows the tops of trees pricked through the mist, as if one looked down into a forest; they were only the poplars and Balm of Gilead that grew on the steep slope of Morningside, but as Spencer had said, they were _trees_. And beyond them, extending far off into the dim gray horizon, the city--flat roofs, with strange shapes of chimneys, water tanks, or elevator sheds, merged to-day into dark solidity. On clear days, there was a hint of water in the distance, and the balanced curve of a great bridge. After all, thought Catherine, there was air in the bedrooms--you couldn't expect birch trees and stars in the city--and they did have distance and sometimes the enchantment of the varying city from these windows. But it was queer--she smiled as Spencer eyed her over his book--queer that beauty, sunlight, air, should be things for which you paid money; that you had to think yourself fortunate if you could afford one window which did not open upon sordidness.
