The mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away from her daughter. Otherwise she was wholly unresponsive. Joan might have been talking to the deaf.
She divined suddenly something of the tragedy and despair of this inarticulate creature whose body had borne her, who had once been as her daughter was now. Before her mental vision unfolded a vast and sordid tapestry--a patchwork-thing made up of hints, innuendoes and snatches of half-remembered conversations, heretofore meaningless, of a thousand-and-one insignificant circumstances, individually valueless, assembling into an almost intelligible whole: picturing in dim, distorted perspective the history of her mother, drab, pitiful, appalling....
Abruptly, bending forward, Joan touched her lips to the sallow cheek.
"Good-bye," she said stiffly; "I got to go."
She rose. Her mother did not move. Edna stared wonderingly, as though a bystander at a scene of whose meaning she was ignorant. Joan took up her suit-case and went to the door.
"S'long, kid," she saluted her sister lightly. "Take good care of ma while I'm away. See you before long."
She hesitated again in the open doorway, with her hand on the knob.
She was half-way down to the next landing before she became aware of Edna bending over the banisters.
"I 'most forgot: Butch said if you was to come in to tell you to drop around to the store th'safternoon. Said he had something to tell you."
"I dunno. He just said that this morning."
To eyes dazzled by ambition, the news-stand, shouldered on either side by a prosperous delicatessen shop and a more prosperous and ornate corner saloon, wore a look unusually hopeless and pitiful: it was so small, so narrow-chested, so shabby!
Its plate-glass show-window, dim with the accumulated grime of years, bore in block letters of white enamel--with several letters missing--the legend:
Newsd ler & Stationer igars & Con tionery
Before the door stood a wooden newspaper stand, painted red and black, advertising the one-cent evening sheet which furnished it gratis. A few dusty stacks of papers ornamented it. The door was wide open, disclosing an interior furnished with dirt-smeared show-cases which housed a stock of cheap cigars and tobacco, boxes of villainous candy to be retailed by the cent's-worth, writing-paper in gaudy, fly-specked packages, magazines, and a handful of brittle toys, perennially unsold. The floor was seldom swept and had never been scrubbed in all the nine years that Thursby had been a tenant of the place.