In the dance hall McGregor sat on a seat by the wall
with one of the two women lauded by the barber and
a third one who was frail and bloodless. To him
the adventure had been a failure. The swing of
the dance music struck no answering chord in him.
He saw the couples on the floor clasped in each other’s
arms, writhing and turning, swaying back and forth,
looking into each other’s eyes and turned aside
wishing himself back in his room among the law books.
The barber talked to two of the women, bantering them.
McGregor thought the conversation inane and trivial.
It skirted the edge of things and ran off into vague
references to other times and adventures of which
he knew nothing.
The barber danced away with one of the women.
She was tall and the head of the barber barely Passed
her shoulder. His black beard shone against her
white dress. The two women sat beside him and
talked. McGregor gathered that the frail woman
was a maker of hats. Something about her attracted
him and he leaned against the wall and looked at her,
not hearing the talk.
A youth came up and took the other woman away.
From across the hall the barber beckoned to him.
A thought flashed into his mind. This woman beside
him was frail and thin and bloodless like the women
of Coal Creek. A feeling of intimacy with her
came over him. He felt as he had felt concerning
the tall pale girl of Coal Creek when they together
gether had climbed the hill to the eminence that looked
down into the valley of farms.
Edith Carson the milliner, whom fate had thrown into
the company of McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four
and lived alone in two rooms at the back of her millinery
store. Her life was almost devoid of colour.
On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family
on an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among
the samples in the show case along the wall and went
to church, sitting by herself in the same seat Sunday
after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the
sermon.
On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a
park and walked alone under the trees. If it
threatened rain she sat in the larger of the two rooms
back of the shop sewing on new dresses for herself
or for a sister who had married a blacksmith in the
Indiana town and who had four children.
Edith had soft mouse-coloured hair and grey eyes with
small brown spots on the iris. She was so slender
that she wore pads about her body under her dress
to fill it out. In her youth she had had a sweetheart—a
fat round-cheeked boy who lived on the next farm.
Once they had gone together to the fair at the county
seat and coming home in the buggy at night he had
put his arm about her and kissed her. “You
ain’t very big,” he had said.
Edith sent to a mail order house in Chicago and bought
the padding which she wore under her dress With it
came an oil which she rubbed on herself. The
label on the bottle spoke of the contents with great
respect as a wonderful developer. The heavy pads
wore raw places on her side against which her clothes
rubbed but she bore the pain with grim stoicism, remembering
what the fat boy had said.
