In trade circles Ernestine was known as the "Laundryman," a name in which respect was mixed with chaff. Ernestine did not care. She knew that she had "made good," and it was pleasant. She could afford now to have a home of her own, and so she had installed herself in this apartment, far out of the dirt and the noise in which she had lived her life. She filled it with a strange assortment of furniture and ornamental accessories that did not please her. Somehow after all her years of longing, and all her efforts to make a home like other people, she had failed lamentably, and she knew it.
"I guess it ain't in me!" she confessed to Milly.
Nevertheless, she kept the vision of it,--the vision she had had through the swaying muslin curtains of "number 232."
Thus far Ernestine had come when she happened into Milly's life. Only the merest outline of her strenuous, if monotonous, existence has been given, and though Ernestine deserves much more,--deserves to be known in her mind and her feelings, yes, and in her soul,--she must put up, as she did in life, with getting less than her deserts, and let her rough actions reveal her nature imperfectly.
The next morning--it was Sunday--when Ernestine presented herself at the Reddon flat to inquire in her heavy, grumbling voice for "the little gurl," Milly had difficulty in recognizing the woman who had offered Virginia an asylum the night before. Ernestine was now clothed in a well-cut walking suit of dark blue broadcloth, which became her square figure much better than the soft folds of the rose-pink negligee. Yet Milly thought her "quite common," and had a momentary pang, realizing how she and her daughter had come down in the world when they were obliged to have such neighbors. But Ernestine Geyer was not "common," and Milly, with her quick instinct for personal values, realized it as soon as she could recover from the shock of the harsh voice and the ungrammatical idiom.
After the obvious remarks about the evening's episode and some conversation with Virginia, for whom the stranger's withered hand had a great fascination, there was a pause. It was time for Ernestine to depart, and she knew it; but either her awkwardness kept her fixed in her chair or she was too much fascinated by Milly to stir. This morning Milly had put on a loose silk blouse, open at the neck, in which she looked very pretty and girlish. Ernestine stared at her in frank admiration. Milly could not understand that she embodied to this "queer" woman all that her heart had secretly longed for,--all the feminism in which she knew herself to be utterly lacking. She tried to take Virginia in her lap to caress her, but that demure little lady, submitting politely for a few moments, slipped off at the first chance and took refuge in her mother's lap, where she snuggled with conscious pleasure. Ernestine did not know how to hold a child.